What Wade Knew
by skyebugs
Summary: Wade overhears Rhett's crying confession to Melanie after Scarlett's miscarriage, setting in motion a series of events with the potential to mend the Butler marriage. [5/16: see A/N for last chapter]
1. Childhood's End

_Well, to quote another romantic hero, in vain I have struggled. Scarlett and Rhett have won. I am again working on Mending Wall and should have an update by the end of July or else a couple of them in August. And in the meantime I've picked up a little story I had outlined a few years ago. It's the first time I've written a what if - think of it as a summer diversion, easy to write and hopefully easy to update. It will also be a fast-moving story, if I can get it to cooperate, and one that won't stay in Wade's POV after this first chapter, much as I've enjoyed writing it. Your comments are much appreciated, as I slowly find my feet in this GWTW fanfic business again._

 _This story, too, is for iso,_ il miglior fabbro _of Butler kids antics and in general._

* * *

 **Chapter I: Childhood's End**

 _"'You understand little boys, don't you, Uncle Rhett?'" (GWTW Ch. L)_

* * *

His mother was dying, of that there was no doubt. An entire day had passed since Wade and his sisters had been sent to his Aunt Melly's and not a word had come from home. The silence was not good. The silence could only mean one thing. His mother was not getting better, his mother was dying and no one wanted to tell him the truth. He knew other boys whose mothers had died and hearses had come to take them away. His grandmother had been sick and then she had died and, when they got to Tara, it was too late. Her room was dark and smelled of medicine, just like his mother's did now.

His mother had been sick before, when his sister Ella was born and they were living in his Aunt Pittypat's house, and later, when they had moved in their big house and his sister Bonnie was born. But this was nothing like those days. Back then everyone had frowned at him and pushed him out of the way and called him a bad boy. He would have been happy to be called a bad boy now. Instead, every time they came out of Mother's room and saw him spying from the hallway, they looked at him with something like pity in their eyes. His Aunt Pittypat had clutched him to her chest and cried. "The poor children, the poor children," she wailed before Aunt Melly, her face white and tired, had raised her voice to hush her. Aunt Melly had never before raised her voice at anyone.

His Uncle Ashley was the one who had brought Aunt Pittypat to visit. He had to stop outside the door to Mother's bedroom and wait for the women to come out. He didn't go in. Men were not allowed to go in, Uncle Rhett had told Wade, except for Dr. Meade. Uncle Ashley looked tired, he had those lines near his mouth like old people have, as if their whole face is made of crumpled paper. He didn't talk much and Wade thought he looked uneasy standing there in the hallway. He and Aunt Melly always looked like that when they came to visit.

On the other side of the hall, the door to his Uncle Rhett's bedroom was open. At first Uncle Rhett had let Wade stay there and wait with him. They didn't talk of anything, they just sat together on the edge of the bed and looked at Mother's door across the hall. But then Uncle Rhett had sent him away and sat himself directly on the floor and smoked so much that Wade was dizzy just from the smoke that drifted out of the room. Uncle Rhett was still on the floor when Uncle Ashley arrived but he didn't get up to greet him. He didn't say anything.

After he'd taken Aunt Pittypat to her carriage, Uncle Ashley returned for Wade and his sisters. He and Uncle Rhett locked eyes and looked at each other for a moment in a way Wade had never seen two persons look at each other before. When Uncle Rhett's face was not shaved and his eyes gleamed like that, he looked just like a pirate and it was frightening. But then his eyes were blank again and he seemed to be looking directly through the other man and at Mother's door. And then they had left for his Aunt Melly's house.

That night, Pork came to see Dilcey. Pork and Dilcey were husband and wife, but they didn't live in the same house. Why it was so, Wade didn't know. His mother and Uncle Rhett were married and they lived in the same house. So did Aunt Melly and Uncle Ashley. But Dilcey lived in a small room at his Aunt Melly's and Pork was their butler at home. They stood together in the small hallway that led to the kitchen and Wade heard Pork's voice rising and falling rapidly, but he couldn't make out any of the words. And then Dilcey looked towards the parlor, where his sisters were playing with Uncle Ashley and Beau, and she looked like she was very, very sorry.

And just like that he made his decision. He had to go home and see his mother. He'd go and ask Uncle Rhett not to send him away again and Uncle Rhett would understand, like he always did. He would have sneaked out the kitchen door immediately, but Pork was still there and would surely not allow him to leave. It was better to wait until everyone went to bed. Aunt Melly had not returned home, so Ella and Bonnie were sleeping in her room. He and Beau shared the small nursery next door. He sat wide-eyed in the dark, listening to the sound of Uncle Ashley's voice through the thin wall, reading a tale to the girls. If only he could read faster! It seemed like centuries before he heard Uncle Ashley's steps in the hallway and then the soft click of his bedroom door. He got up from his small cot in an instant and started putting on his clothes.

"What's happening?" Beau's asked sleepily from his bed. His voice was loud like the crack of a gun in the small room.

"Shhh," Wade whispered frantically. "I am going home."

Beau sat up in his bed. "Home? What are you going home for?"

Wade hesitated, but in the end he could not voice it, his terrible suspicion. Maybe if he didn't say it aloud, it wouldn't come true.

"I have to see how my mother is," he said, bending down to tie his shoelaces.

"But Father said he'd take us in the morning," Beau whispered reasonably.

"I want to go now," Wade said, quite stubbornly. "And you're not to tell anyone."

"Wait," Beau said, throwing his legs over the edge of the bed. "I am coming with you."

Wade looked at the small frame of his cousin in the moonlight and suddenly it didn't seem like such a bad idea to have someone next to him on the dark streets. He nodded quickly.

"All right, then. But hurry!"

They ran all the way to Wade's house. The night was soft and warm and full of sounds. They could hear them from all sides: the rustling of leaves, the mournful baying of a dog in the distance, a distant murmur of voices even, floating on the wind. They ran as fast as their legs could carry them, trying not to breathe too loudly for fear they'd stir some untold danger from beyond the protective circle drawn by the gas lights. Beau got a stitch in his side and had to stop just as the towers of the Butler house came into view at the top of the hill.

"Come on, Beau! Hurry!" Wade whispered, fighting an urge to grab his arm and drag him the rest of the way to the house.

General Forrest, Wade's St. Bernard, growled menacingly behind the gate as they opened it, but then it recognized its young master and was silent. They went swiftly into the house through the front door, which someone had left unlocked. The gas lamps were burning dimly in the hallway, making the massive shadows of the furniture loom like monsters along the walls. Apart from their trembling shapes and the hiss of the burning gas, everything was silent and motionless, so silent and so motionless that Wade could feel panic rising painfully in his stomach.

They went up the wide, carpeted stairs to the second floor. This was where his mother had fallen, Wade knew, and he looked behind him at the tumbling darkness. His sister Ella had always been afraid of the grand staircase. When she was a little younger, she'd fought him over a toy sword and, as he let go of it, she lost her balance and fell on her bottom, a hairsbreadth's away from the edge of the top step. She'd cried for hours and hours. That was the only time Wade had ever been spanked by his stepfather.

They went down the hall quietly, their footfalls swallowed by the thick carpet. No door was open, not even Uncle Rhett's, and Wade swallowed uneasily. He had imagined the house would look just like when he had left it, with people going in and out of his mother's room, and Uncle Rhett on the floor or the edge of his bed, following them with his eyes. He had imagined he would go to him and Uncle Rhett would tell him how Mother was, and tousle his hair as he did, and then let him and Beau wait in his room. But Uncle Rhett was not here to see them right away and Wade suddenly felt shy.

Alone he would have hid near the stairs and waited for a door to open, or even lost his courage entirely and run back to his Aunt Melly's house. But Beau was looking at him expectantly so he couldn't stop. They hesitantly inched their way to the doors at the end of the corridor—his mother's and Uncle Rhett's. And as they did, they heard a noise. It was like the sound of a harsh, choked breath, growing less and less faint the closer they got to Uncle Rhett's room. When they were close enough, they could tell what it was, and froze in place. It was the sound of a man crying. And judging by the muffled voice coming from behind the door, it was the sound of Uncle Rhett crying.

Wade's stomach turned to lead. They were too late. His mother was already dead. He felt tears prickling behind his eyelids and all he wanted to do was sink into a corner and cry. Beau was looking at him with wide, worried eyes. And then he did something that any other day would have made Wade jealous for its bravery. He pushed the door softly with the tip of his shoe. The door had been closed but had not clicked shut, and now it opened just a crack, enough for sound and light to spill out. But the words that emerged were anything but reassuring.

"Belle said we would kill each other in the end, and I've done it. I've killed Scarlett," Uncle Rhett said hoarsely.

Wade drew a sharp breath.

"No, Captain Butler, no," came Aunt Melly's soothing voice from within the room. "I told you, she's not dead. She'll be fine.'

But Rhett seemed not to hear her. "I've killed Scarlett, I've killed her. You don't understand."

At first Wade could only feel overwhelming relief at Aunt Melly's words. His mother was not dead, his mother was getting better. The terror that had been sitting on his chest, not letting him breathe for the past two days, lost some of its weight.

But in the dark Uncle Rhett continued to talk. Some words were ugly, and some Wade did not understand at all, but he grasped some parts, the most important parts. Uncle Rhett had hurt his mother and had run away and, when he came back, he made her fall down the stairs. His Aunt Melly kept saying it was not so, but Wade knew it was true. All his confused memories of the last three months fell into place in his mind to tell him it was true. He again felt the pressure of tears in his eyes, but this time they were hot, angry tears. He could not look at his cousin. Finally, he could stand no more and broke into a run, down the dark stairs and out of the house.

He ran down Peachtree Street so fast his shins hurt. His chest felt full and heavy, as if it was going to overflow at any second and running was the only thing that kept it from doing so. The pressure built in his throat until he finally had to stop and take deep, gulping breaths. Beau, who had been running silently behind him, too afraid to call after him, finally caught up.

"Wait—Wade—you shouldn't have—gone off like that—" he wheezed.

Wade did not say anything. They were already close to Ivy Street and they walked the rest of the way in silence, shuffling their feet. The small windows of Beau's house were dark; no one had noticed their absence. As they were slipping back into their beds, Wade finally spoke.

"You have to promise you won't tell anyone what we heard. Promise, Beau," he said fiercely.

Beau looked troubled, but he nodded. Wade turned to his side on the cot, facing the wall. The thoughts that running had kept at bay were now turning round and round in his head, like sharp-beaked birds. Everything he had thought he knew about his family was gone, replaced by a welter of anger and hurt. To think he had been so happy when Rhett had married his mother! To think he'd wanted to be Rhett's son once! Rhett who did not love Mother, who had almost killed her. Rhett who had only pretended to love them and care for them, who had been gone for months without a thought for them. Oh, if only his own father were alive! He'd challenge Rhett to a duel and kill him for what he had done. He wished Rhett _were_ dead.

Tears unexpectedly filled his eyes at the thought and he dashed at them furiously. Real men, he had come to decide, did not cry.


	2. After the Storm

_Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it a timely update to a skyebugs story? (It's totally a plane, don't be fooled.)_

 _This chapter is the last one where we stay pretty much in canon before we spread our wings (rev up our engines? mix our metaphors?) and try to rescue these two idiots. So if it's a little sad, blame Mitchell. If you like the prose, also blame Mitchell because I shamelessly nicked some of hers. Not a ton, but enough._

 _A great thank you to iso for her mad editing skills and general patience for my nonsense. And a great thank you to you, lovely people, whose reviews have really worked wonders on my motivation and inspiration levels. I am thinking Mondays with Wade could become a thing._

* * *

 **Chapter II: After the Storm**

 _"He had been kindness itself during her miserable convalescence, but it was the kindness of an impersonal stranger." (GWTW Ch. LVII)_

* * *

And then there was light again. For the duration of her illness, her room had been shrouded in darkness, a darkness warm and stifling, heavy and oppressive, a darkness from which nameless terrors extended clammy fingers to grab at her body and mind. And among those terrors, there was one in particular that rose above all others—the fear of death, the sickening feeling that she wouldn't be able to face this last terrible trial life had set aside for her and she would die. But she had not died. She was now getting better and she had asked for the windows to be opened, the curtains to be drawn.

The heavy plush curtains were pushed to the side and the warm sun of July slanted into the room, hurting her eyes. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered as long as she was not forced to stay in the dark any longer. Dr. Meade had pronounced her out of danger two days ago and she had been getting stronger ever since. Her body, though weak and tinged with pain, did not burn anymore and she could now manage to hold down more than one spoon of soup at a time. But her mind had not recovered at the same pace. It was as if there was a gray net in front of her eyes that made everything look blurred and distant and inconsequential. There had been things that were important to her before the fall; she could not remember what they were. There had been things that burned bright with fever in her mind during her illness; they too were gone without a trace. She was tired and she was in pain, but beyond that her mind was empty.

At first it seemed that fresh air and light would help, for there was a certain pleasure the body took in being reminded that it was alive in the world and the world went on. But the relief was fleeting and it diminished with each passing minute until, half an hour after the windows were opened, she felt like rolling into a ball under the blankets, gripped by a sort of faint, relentless nausea at everything around her. She couldn't move, because of her broken rib, and wouldn't order the room to be darkened again, so she just stared at the wall dejectedly until the sun started to set. The gray net was firmly in place over the world.

The next day, Rhett came to visit her for the first time since the accident. Mammy was busy folding some laundry in a corner and made a move to leave, but he stopped her with a short wave of his hand.

"I won't be long," he said.

He inquired after her health kindly and somewhat formally, as if he was the well-bred master of this house and she a stranger that had mysteriously fallen ill on his doorstep. Her heart, which had started to beat swiftly in confusion when he first entered the room, settled down with each courteous question. He had dark circles under his eyes and his face was puffy from drink, she noted dispassionately. And he had paled when he first saw her. She asked for a mirror when he was gone and the woman who greeted her in the reflection _was_ a stranger. There was a large, dark bruise on one side of her face, fading to yellow towards the margins, and her eyes and cheeks were hollow.

The next time Rhett came into her room, he brought the children with him. They filed in silently to kiss her cheek and Ella whispered in her ear, "Will we read about the ugly duckie again, Mommy?" Scarlett nodded wearily to appease her, for the impulse that had made her read to Ella during Rhett's absence had spent itself. Bonnie, who had been prevented by her father from jumping on the bed, quickly grew bored.

"Can we have ice cream now, Daddy?" she whispered loudly, plucking at his sleeve.

Beneath layers of numbness, Scarlett was stung by the speed with which her daughter had returned to her father's side. But on the wings of that feeling came the echoes of vile things that had been said between her and Rhett, and she couldn't dwell on it. She closed her eyes tiredly and Rhett led the children out of the room. Wade, who had barely uttered two words the whole time he was there, looked as if he wanted to linger. His stepfather's hand was almost on his shoulder when he suddenly sped up and caught up with his sisters.

She didn't welcome the silence. As the days passed, painful thoughts had begun to return to her mind like blood rushes back to numb limbs, and she was helpless against them. She closed her eyes and she was falling down the stairs again. She opened them and there was nothing she could cling to—for the baby was gone, any foolish hope she might have had in Rhett was gone, Ashley estranged, the town turned against her. For the first time in her life, she could see no way out of trouble, no landmark in this endless nightmare country she was travelling through. She had received too many blows in too short a time and her mind was powerless to do anything but take stock, again and again, of its losses.

The patient was not eating enough, Dr. Meade had pronounced. She would not regain her full strength at this pace. Plates of her favorite foods started pouring out of the kitchens and she returned them all almost untouched, despite Mammy's grumbling. It was then that Rhett started to visit her more frequently, and always during her meals. He made the most pointless small talk, but under his implacable eye, she ate. His manner was the same as on that first day he came to see her—bland and solicitous, and emptied of almost everything that made him Rhett.

And Scarlett discovered she was relieved by this change in him. At one time, she would have missed his jokes and devilish charm, but now all she could remember were his cruel jibes and his anger, and she was glad those were gone. He had not said he was sorry and she didn't know if he was. Perhaps he simply didn't care or perhaps he still thought the child she had lost wasn't his. There was no use in wondering about it, the result was the same, and things left unsaid at first became impossible to say afterwards. She no more wanted to hear them than Rhett seemed to want to offer them. As she ate in silence and he talked smoothly of federal politics, it was as if there was a glass wall between them that both were eager not to break.

The other person who had come to visit her more often was Wade. He only sneaked into her room when Mammy or Rhett were not there, and Scarlett knew he was doing it against their commands, for they didn't allow the children to visit her unsupervised. She had no energy to chasten him herself and no wish to talk to either Mammy or especially Rhett about it, and so she let him stay. Wade had always been tongue-tied around her and at first she found some of her old annoyance rising in her at the way he sat there awkwardly, twisting his foot.

"D-does it hurt much?" he finally stammered.

"No, not anymore," Scarlett replied, a little taken aback. She racked her brains for something else to say to him. "Were you a good boy while I was sick?"

He bit his lip. "Yes," he nodded. "I was at Cousin Beau's."

He then launched into a hesitant narration of everything he had done at his Cousin Beau's. Scarlett nodded from time to time, her eyelids starting to feel heavy. When she woke up, Wade was no longer there. He came more often after that, told her little stories about his cousin and friends, and showed her the contents of his pockets. He never stayed long and always stopped when she started to look tired. Nevertheless, he had grown more comfortable around her and Scarlett remembered bemusedly how much she had wanted this when Rhett and Bonnie were away. How far those days seemed now!

"Mother," he said one afternoon, "why don't we go to Tara? Rh—Uncle Rhett can take care of the mills and the store for you."

She was startled to hear this from her shy son, even more so because it was what she had been thinking herself. She couldn't stay in Atlanta and let her mind force itself round and round the deeply worn circle of her worries forever. She had begun to think longingly of Tara, of a place of safety and succor where she could lick her wounds and recover. It seemed that if she could only get back to the stillness and the green cotton fields of home, all her troubles would fall away and she would somehow be able to mold her shattered thoughts into something she could live by. Yes, she would go to Tara and everything would be all right.

She told Rhett of her decision that very evening. He nodded, but there was bleakness in his eyes as if he were watching the foregone, sad conclusion to a play. Something in that look rankled her long after he left the room, but in the end she pushed it from her mind and fell asleep thinking of the rolling, sweeping beauty of the hills at home.


	3. This Changes Everything

_Happy Monday! Here's the new installment of this little story. It contains a playful nod to two of my favorite fics: Iris' The Box and isolabella's The Necklace. If you haven't read them, you really should, because they're beautiful (you can find them in my favorites list). They both work with the premise "Give Bonnie meaningful object and she'll fix her parents' marriage." I thought the other kids needed to get in on the fun as well, so here I am. But don't worry, Bonnie is still the glue holding her parents together..._

 _Before we get to the actual chapter, I have a long list of thank you's to distribute. To iso, of course, for using precious time to look over this chapter and offer suggestions to fix it. To Bella and Kelly who read the first chapters of the story and offered lovely feedback for all of them, and especially for this one. To SJ for encouraging me to get in touch with my inner Melanie. And of course to you, dear readers who left comments. They really make all the difference._

 _Literary kleptomania update: Getting better! I only stole like half a sentence from MM this time._

* * *

 **Chapter III: This Changes Everything**

 _"'I like babies and I like little children, till they begin to grow up and acquire adult habits of thought and adult abilities to lie and cheat and be dirty. That can't be news to you. You know I like Wade Hampton a lot, for all that he isn't the boy he ought to be.'" (GWTW Chapter XXXVIII)_

* * *

In the end it was Ella who brought it to a head. She had quite unexpectedly been left alone with her mother. Rhett had gone to the bank in the morning and left Wade to look over his sisters. As had become their semi-serious ritual after Bonnie was born, he'd handed the boy his watch, a sign that he was now in charge. But a mere twenty minutes after he was gone, all hell had broken loose. Bonnie had somehow gotten hold of some glue the servants used to fix their shoes and had attached several of her siblings' possessions to each other, the wall of the nursery, and, unfortunately, her own person. And so Mammy had brought a crying Ella to her mother's room, while she, Wade, and everyone else in the house tried to straighten up the mess and come up with a solution that did not include shearing Bonnie's curls.

Scarlett had rolled her eyes, but did her best to soothe her daughter. She offered to let her try all of her perfumes and even jewelry, to no avail, and in the end, she found herself reading from Ella's favorite story book that had only escaped the glue debacle because its hopeful young owner carried it with her everywhere. After the first few pages, the little girl's sobs subsided and she started to play with the perfume bottles her mother had let her lay out on the bed. From time to time, she'd interrupt Scarlett with a question that revealed she was still very much preoccupied with her recent misery.

"Did duckie cry?"

"Did the prince cry?"

"But, mommy, do swans cry?"

"Ella, how on Earth is it important if all these creatures cry or not?" Scarlett asked, finally losing her patience.

"Boo told me Uncle cried," Ella replied with a shrug, not looking at her mother.

Scarlett sank back against her pillows, arrested. Beau told her… Beau must have heard his father cry. Her heart squeezed guiltily. Sunk in her own worries, she hadn't thought much of Ashley since her fall, other than to add his distance from her to the long list of things that were wrong with the world. And all this time he had suffered! How it must have hurt him not to be by her side, if he had been reduced to tears, her proud Ashley! Hadn't she felt the same when he was shot and it was only Melanie that had the right to tend to his wounds?

Sensing she had captured her mother's attention, Ella continued with gusto, hiccupping softly.

"He and Wade came home when me and Bonnie were asleep and they saw Uncle cry in his room. Wade said Boo had to promise not to tell anybody."

It took a moment for the import of what Ella was saying to sink in. _Rhett_ cried? She shook her head slightly. The image was so incongruous she could not even conjure it to her mind. _Rhett_?

"Ella," she said carefully, putting the book down, "who cried, exactly?"

"Uncle Rhett," Ella said, her eyes wide and candid.

"I see. Sweetheart, why don't you tell Mother everything Beau told you?"

It wasn't much, what Ella knew, for her cousin had almost immediately regretted his childish brag. Still, Scarlett digested the meager information in stunned silence, all thoughts of Ashley forgotten. Oh, it was foolish to care! For one thing, she didn't even know that it was true. She couldn't credit Ella with enough imagination to invent the whole thing, but perhaps Beau had, though she couldn't imagine why a child would invent something like that. And if it was true, what did it mean? What difference did it make that Rhett— Rhett who'd jeered cruelly at her before her fall and acted as if there had never been anything at all between them after—had cried when she was ill? Perhaps he had been drunk. He must have been drunk.

No, it didn't make any difference to her. What she needed was silence, rest, and time to heal, not futile attempts to understand Rhett's behavior. But despite this knowledge she was gripped by a strange agitation. It was as if a small insistent light had been lit at the edge of her mind and she could not look away from it. She had to know if it was true. Ella had said Melanie was there with Rhett that night. It was humiliating to have to ask others what your own husband was thinking, but Melanie of all people wouldn't judge her and could always be bullied into telling the truth. And once she knew the truth, then…

"Ella darling, call Prissy for me. I want her to take a note to Melly's."

::o::o::o::

It was a slightly disheveled Melanie that made her way up the stairs of the Butler mansion, her small frame dwarfed by the sumptuous surroundings. She had been playing with Beau when Scarlett's note arrived and had rushed out in a hurry, leaving her son in Dilcey's care. She knew that if anything serious had happened, it would have been Mammy or Captain Butler sending for her, not Scarlett, but still she worried. Ever since that day almost three weeks ago when she had received news of her sister-in-law's accident, worry had been Melanie Wilkes's almost constant companion.

Some of that anxiety had dissipated when Pork told her at the door that Miss Scarlett was doing well. But as she ascended the stairs, eyes firmly fixed on the step in front of her, there was still a thread of unease on her mind. She hoped Captain Butler would not be home to meet her in the upper hall. It was an ungenerous thought, she knew, for he cared so much for his wife, and he was always so somber and polite. But despite this, the few times they had spoken during Scarlett's convalescence, she had not been able to meet his eyes. The memory of that dreadful night when Scarlett had been so ill and he had been so _drunk_ —she hated to even think the word—was still very much alive in her mind. She could only pray Captain Butler had forgotten all about it, for Ashley had once told her that men frequently did not remember things said and done in drink.

The upper hall was empty and Melanie knocked softly on Scarlett's door. As she entered the room, she quickly assessed its occupant's appearance. The eye of the sister could not get used to seeing Scarlett—so strong and healthy, so dear to her heart—bedridden. Fear of what could have happened and relief that it had not battled in her chest like they always did when she came to visit. But the eye of the nurse was pleased with her patient's progress. Scarlett was still terribly thin and pale, but she could sit up against her pillows now. The large bruise on her cheek had begun to mellow into the yellows and browns of healing and her face had lost some of its gauntness. Yet there were two faint patches of color burning high in her cheeks that worried Melanie.

"Are you all right, dear?" she asked in a soft voice.

"Yes," Scarlett answered swiftly. "Come sit by the bed, Melly. I have something to ask you and you have to promise you'll tell me the truth."

"Of course, dear. Anything you want."

"Has Rhett talked to you in his room while I was ill?"

Melanie froze in place, surprise and embarrassment rising in her chest and bringing hot blood to her cheeks. It was the conversation she had been dreading, but she had not for one moment imagined that she would be having it with Scarlett, that Scarlett would somehow know about that terrible night. Could Captain Butler have told her something? Surely not, for everything about that scene could only agitate Scarlett. He had been so drunk and unlike himself, and had said so many foolish things about his marriage—what woman would want to hear that about her husband? And especially Scarlett, who was so proud and passionate herself. Scarlett who was now looking at her with a queer, intent light in her eyes.

"What did he say, Melly?" she asked, leaning forward so quickly Melanie was startled.

"Scarlett dear, you will make yourself ill again," she said, twisting her hands miserably.

"I _will_ make myself ill if you don't tell me right this moment. I swear I am going to get out of this bed, Melanie Wilkes, and it will be your fault."

"No, dear heart, no. Captain Butler was simply upset," Melanie said in an appeasing tone. "He—he was very worried for you. He was afraid you would die. I think the whole time Dr. Meade was in here, when your fever was at its worst, he sat in his room, watching your door and asking whether you were better and whether you had called for him."

She hoped Scarlett wouldn't guess Captain Butler had been drunk. It was forgivable under the circumstances, for few men could endure great pain without alcohol, like women did. Still, she thought a wife might be upset to learn that of her husband. But Scarlett didn't seem to think of it.

"Whether I called for him?" she asked with a slight frown, leaning back against her pillows.

"Yes, but of course you couldn't call for him," Melanie said swiftly. "You were delirious."

Scarlett stared silently ahead of her for a few moments, as if mulling over something, then her eyes were fixed on Melanie again. The light was gone from them, but a strange determination had taken its place.

"What else did he say? I want to know his exact words."

"Oh, Scarlett, I couldn't tell you. He was beside himself with worry. He cares so much for you and, of course, because he was there when you had the accident, he blamed himself for not being able to stop it."

She struggled to put into words the essence of that awful night's confession. There had been more things Captain Butler had said, but those she passed over in silence, not because they were dark and shameful, or because recounting them would be betraying his confidence; but because, deep down, she knew them to be untrue. Real cruelty had brushed by her that night but she had not recognized it for what it was, for her pure heart could no more countenance evil than a shining lamp takes notice of darkness gathered in the corners of rooms. What she knew to be true beneath all of it was what she was telling Scarlett now: that Captain Butler had suffered and that he loved his wife. The rest were just the outpourings of a mind strained by anguish and drink.

But as she spoke, a memory rose unbidden to her mind. The image of Rhett's hands clinging to her skirts, predatory and brutal, the sound of the vilest words he had uttered that night, the words he claimed he had said to his wife before her accident. She had decided they were not true at the time, but now, looking at Scarlett's pale, bruised face, she remembered her moment of doubt.

After the day of Ashley's birthday party, the knowledge that she had welcomed into her house and heart the people that would later try to harm her family had weighed heavily on Melanie's mind The mean-spiritedness must have been in them before, but she had failed to see it—had refused even when warned to see it, in Archie's case—and the two dearest people she had in this world, apart from Beau, had been slandered and hurt. She had resolved never to let that happen again. Scarlett and Ashley came first and she would not allow even the slightest whisper of harm to touch either of them again. However inconceivable the thought might be, however unkind it was to even briefly entertain it, she had to know for sure.

"Scarlett," she started hesitantly, "don't be upset, but I have to ask. Did Captain Butler—did he say something to you before—before you fell?"

She felt blood rising in her cheeks even as she asked the question, but she held Scarlett's gaze with earnest, worried eyes. Scarlett looked at her in silence for a long moment, her expression unreadable.

"No," she finally said. "No. He did not say anything."

Melanie breathed in relief. "Of course he did not! How silly of me, he had just arrived."

Her heart had not been wrong. No man who loved a woman like Captain Butler loved Scarlett, no man who was so undone by his wife's illness and so involved in her recovery, could have hurt her with such unforgivable words. Spurred by the notion that she had been unfair to even think that of Captain Butler, she rushed to praise his love and devotedness. But Scarlett was not listening anymore. She was staring at the bed covers, an absent look on her face. When she finally looked up and interrupted Melanie, her eyes were the color of hazy ponds whose bottoms had been stirred by a storm.

"Melly, did Rhett—did he…"

"What, darling?"

Scarlett shook her head slightly. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

::o::o::o::

When Rhett arrived home in the late afternoon, Wade was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. He looked terribly serious, as he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, hands behind his back; and Rhett smiled.

"Is everything all right, son?" he asked, shrugging out of his linen jacket.

"Bonnie glued a toy to her hair, sir," Wade replied with no preamble, "and Mammy had to cut two inches of her hair to get it out."

Rhett looked upward and sighed. "Good for Mammy. Anything else?"

"Aunt Melly came to visit, sir. And here is your watch, sir," he said, bringing one of his hands from behind his back and opening his fist.

In his palm was Rhett's watch, broken. Its metal lid unhinged, the hands fallen, the crystal cracked throughout and almost shattered. Rhett was speechless for a second as Wade deposited the object in his hand.

"I dropped it," the boy shrugged.

His stepfather frowned at the words, eyes swiftly scanning his face.

"Wade… is there anything wrong?"

"No, sir" Wade said, squaring his chin in a way Rhett had seen before in his wife and her father. "Will you go see Bonnie now?"

"Yes, of course," Rhett murmured. "Don't worry about this. I'll buy another."

Wade nodded and quickly turned to go up the stairs. Rhett followed, his thumb pensively rubbing the broken lid of his watch.


	4. A Shard of Glass

_I'm updating a day early, because the temptation to keep fiddling with this chapter is too great and I have other work to do tonight. It's the longest chapter yet and I do hope you all like it, because boy, did it take some work. Greatest thanks to iso, who never lets me get away with anything, and to SJ, who managed to see more things afoot in my motto than most people would have. And of course a friendly wave to everyone who left reviews. Hope you're all having a lovely summer!_

 _Now, someone asked how old the kids are, so here goes. We started off mid July 1871, so Wade's 9 and a half (born Jan/Feb 1862), Beau's almost 7 (born 1 Sept 1864), Ella's close to 5 (born Oct 1866) and Bonnie is 2 (born at some point in 1869) - though you wouldn't necessarily know that from the way MM writes Bonnie and I guess you won't know it from here either._

 _And speaking of birthdays, this chapter turned out to be an early present for one lovely lady in the fandom. So happy birthday, Bella!_

* * *

 **Chapter IV: A Shard of Glass**

 _"…if you had come even halfway to meet me, had given me some sign, I think I'd have kissed your feet." (GWTW Ch. LXIII)_

* * *

The facts as she had them were simple. Rhett had been sorry for her accident. He had been waiting for her to call him when she was ill. He had cried. She couldn't bring herself to ask Melanie about that last, but it didn't matter. The children's story had turned out to be true, so this was true as well. Rhett had cried. Yes, the facts were simple, but what to make of them less so, and her mind turned on that point tirelessly in the days following Melanie's confession.

At first all she had felt was a strange emptiness in the middle of her chest. She remembered like in a dream those frightening moments of her illness when she'd wished Rhett could be there to battle death on her behalf. She remembered too how she had refrained from calling his name, for even in the throes of fever her mind had known he did not want her. To think that all this time he had been across the hall, waiting for her to call him by her side... She could have had his comfort and support in those dark hours. She could have lain her burden on his broad shoulders and he would have carried it for her. The very thought was dizzying. It opened up an avenue of vertigo where everything she thought she had known about her life threatened to swirl around and dissolve into something else entirely.

For if she had been wrong and Rhett had wanted her, then everything changed. Not just the terrible moments of her illness, but the last months in their entirety were suddenly cast in a different light. And what they looked like in this light was nothing but a mire of wrong turns and missed opportunities. She hadn't wanted to remember it after her accident, but she had missed Rhett while he was gone. She had been happy that he was home that day, on the landing. Melanie had said that Rhett too was sorry to have been away for so long, that he wished he had been home sooner, that he had been happy to see her. One couldn't trust all of that, coming as it did from Melly, who only ever saw the good in people. But if any part of it was true, what did that mean? Could it really be that they had both been eager for peace that day and instead they had waged war, needlessly and disastrously?

For a moment, after Melanie had left, that possibility had overwhelmed her. Her mind, numbed by loss, had allowed itself one mercy after the accident: never to dwell on what could have been. But now the thoughts could not be stopped and they embedded themselves into her heart like so many shards of glass. The baby could have lived. She and Rhett could have been happy together. They could have had a pleasant life. She was not sure what form that pleasantness would have taken, but she imagined it would have been like their life at the beginning of their marriage, before they had moved into the new house and Rhett had started to be so nasty. They had been happy then, hadn't they? If all this had been a cruel misunderstanding, then they could have had that back and had lost it for nothing.

But no, that couldn't be right, her mind rushed to defend itself. There surely was a difference between wanting someone and wanting to be by their bedside when they were sick through your fault. And it _was_ Rhett's fault, for she had taken her cue from him that day, she was sure. She remembered quite clearly that she had decided to be civil or even nice to him when he'd arrived. She would have told him about the baby and somehow let him understand that she wanted it. She might have even told him that she had missed his company eventually, she decided suddenly generous of her past self and its virtues. But Rhett had given her no chance for that. He had been hateful to her from the moment he walked through the door. There had been no light for her in his dark eyes, no sign that he was glad to see her again on his face. He hadn't had the look of a man returning home to his wife and family after a long absence. He had the look of one checking into an indifferent hotel!

And just like that she was angry with him. Anger was another one of those things her mind had pushed away during her convalescence. She had been too weak and tired to muster it and, besides, there was something vaguely terrifying about its target that stopped it in its tracks. The night of Ashley's birthday party excluded, Rhett had always made it clear that nothing she said or did could touch him, that ultimately he did not care terribly much for either her or her actions. She had not, however, imagined she could matter so little to him that he would wish actual harm on her and be unrepentant after it happened. That perhaps it didn't even matter to him whether she lived or died. She could not think of it without something like ice gripping her heart and so she hadn't. She had pushed the thought down and, with it, any serious reflection on Rhett's behavior. But now that she knew Rhett had been touched—that Rhett _could_ be touched—she was for the first time in weeks angry with him.

What sort of a man treated his wife, the woman carrying his child, the way he had treated her that day on the landing? The words he had thrown at her in that cool, even tone of his had been despicable, unforgivable. Hadn't he known they would inflame her, goad her into a temper? How could they do anything but that? No, he had done it blithely, deliberately, with no concern for the consequences to either her or the baby.

How dare he cry after that! What good were his tears after what he had done? And to think that he had had the nerve to complain to Melanie and garner her pity while she, Scarlett, was hovering between life and death because of him! To think that he had been shameless enough to discuss her accident with Melanie to begin with! _"Captain Butler blames himself for not being able to stop it."_ Oh, if she were half the blackguard he was, she would have told Melanie exactly what Captain Butler had said and done to cause that accident and watched him tumble from her grace for good. It was nothing more than he deserved.

And going even further into the past, hadn't it all been Rhett's fault from the beginning? Wasn't she pregnant because of him? Hadn't she waited for him like a fool the morning after Ashley's birthday party while he was cavorting at Belle's? Hadn't he taken her daughter away from her? Hadn't he let her live in fear for three months, not knowing if he'd return in time to claim the child, not knowing if she was going to even see him and Bonnie again? Hadn't he badmouthed her to Eulalie and Pauline so he could paint himself as the patient, long-suffering husband? The long litany of Rhett's sins rolled out in her mind as the afternoon wore on, and everywhere she looked, she found herself wronged by him.

And yet, when he entered her room at twilight, her heart leaped foolishly in her chest.

"Have you been unwell tonight?" he asked. "Your color is a little high."

"I am quite all right, thank you" she answered and the words came out stiffly, for her mouth was suddenly dry.

It was as if the outpouring of anger in her chest had stopped abruptly at the sight of him. She hadn't had time to think of whether to confront him or what words to use against him. But it didn't matter now, because he did not look like the man she had wanted to confront. That man was the coldly jeering Rhett from the stairs or the nonchalant one who'd told her he had been at Belle's. This Rhett looked tired and even a little sad, if that last were even possible. She suddenly remembered what his face had been like when he had gathered her in his arms at the bottom of the stairs—white and distorted by fear, as if his features had been undone. It wasn't quite true that he hadn't cared that day. She tried to imagine him crying and the thought made her fidget in discomfort.

Rhett looked at her curiously but didn't make any comment.

"I won't keep you long, in any case," he said. "I heard you had quite a lot of company today. I came to tell you that I talked to Dr. Meade this afternoon. He will examine you tomorrow and tell us how long it will be before you can think of traveling to Tara."

It was as if she had been living a prolonged uneasy dream that afternoon, and his words were calling her back to reality, so removed they were from the things that had occupied her mind the last few hours. She could think of no reply to make, so she only nodded mutely. Rhett bowed slightly, bade her goodnight and left.

Had there been anything in his face, any sign of his feelings, any hint of his thoughts? She couldn't tell. She remembered his expression the day before, when she had announced she wanted to go to Tara, that bleak look that had sat uneasily with her all evening. Had that been because of her or had it been something else entirely? Was it true that he had looked not just weary, but also sad tonight or had she imagined it? Perhaps it had been a trick of the light, for it was strange to even think of that word in connection to her husband. Had she ever seen him sad? She racked her brain for an answer, but none was forthcoming. Oh, why hadn't she paid more attention to Rhett before! She would know all this if she had.

She let out a small noise of frustration and brought her fist down hard on the mattress by her side. The sound echoed in the room, louder than she had thought, and the door opened immediately, as if Rhett had lingered on its other side.

"Is there anything the matter?" he asked, his voice alert.

"N-no, no" she stammered quickly, blood rushing into her face. "I just turned the wrong way. I'm fine now, really."

Rhett had been on the point of entering her room, but her words stopped him on the threshold.

"If it is your rib causing you problems, be sure to tell Dr. Meade tomorrow. You should not travel before you make a full recovery."

She nodded quickly, hoping to end this mortifying episode. She felt absurdly as if she had been caught in something shameful. As the door clicked shut behind her husband for a second time that night, she turned gingerly onto her side, careful not to make any sound.

That night set the tone for the days to come. She lived in frustration and uncertainty. When Rhett was around, she watched him covertly and tried to reconcile his image with that of the man Melanie had described. She could find no intimation of him beneath her husband's endless reserve of impersonal courtesy, and no sign of his deeper thoughts. His face was a book firmly closed to her, like it had always been. Yet the very exercise left her both frustrated and inexplicably breathless, and so she returned to it again and again. And if it made her a little shy or flustered around him, he didn't seem to notice.

When Rhett was not around—and that was most of the time now that Dr. Meade had given her permission to leave her bed—she thought of him, despite herself, and tried to solve the puzzle. Anger and bitterness flared up in her chest occasionally to tell her that there was no puzzle to solve, that there was nothing more to her husband than what she had seen so far. Melanie may have said a lot of startling things about him, but then again Melanie also thought Rhett loved her, which only went to show how little she knew. Besides, she was sure Rhett had presented himself to Melanie in a sympathetic light; the ideal, devoted husband. For no one, not even Melanie Wilkes, could be so naïve as to say "Captain Butler loves you so," if they knew the full extent of Captain Butler's transgressions against you.

But despite this knowledge, her mind would not relent. Every time she resolved not to think about it anymore, it folded back on itself. And again she found herself watching Rhett for a sign, and again she examined the scant evidence she had so far: he had cried when she was ill, he had maybe looked grim when she said she wanted to go to Tara. Dr. Meade had advised her to wait another week and a half before leaving and, as the days passed, she found herself growing slightly anxious at the prospect. It made no sense, for she needed to be back at Tara like she needed air, and yet somehow she felt that going away would mean leaving unfinished business in Atlanta. She told herself she could always use the time to think through it all and return with new strength. But there was something that rankled her about Rhett's look that night—there had been a sort of disquieting finality in his eyes and it made her vaguely apprehensive of the future. What ever had he meant by it? Oh, why couldn't he be a normal man?

And then, of course, there was the topic of Bonnie. Rhett's sins freshly reexamined, Scarlett also rediscovered her resentment at the things he had said about her mothering skills and the way he had stonewalled her every wish regarding Bonnie. And look where that had led. It was clear to her in retrospect that she herself had made undeniable progress with Wade and Ella in Rhett's absence. For didn't Wade spend his afternoons with her by his own initiative now? And hadn't she managed to soothe Ella by herself only a few days ago? Meanwhile, three months alone with Rhett had only served to make Bonnie wild and almost completely unmanageable.

Bonnie was a pretty and vivacious child, and that generally made adults turn a blind eye on her unchecked temper. Even her mother was not immune to her spirited charm. But that indulgence wouldn't last forever, Scarlett knew. What was precious in a baby became wearying in an older child and altogether inconceivable in a young lady. There would be a time when people wouldn't look at Bonnie's stubbornness with a forgiving smile. That Rhett, who had spent many months now waging a campaign to win Atlanta back for his daughter, couldn't see something so simple defied belief.

That he allowed his daughter to hold the entire household captive with her tantrums was altogether more infuriating. The servants were always walking on tiptoes around Bonnie, afraid that otherwise they would be faced with Rhett's anger, like the unfortunate Lou had been the night the lamp in Bonnie's room went out. Meanwhile Bonnie refused to go to bed at anything approaching a reasonable hour or to wear any of the dimity frocks and pinafores Mammy tried to dress her in; for while, she had been away, she had been permitted to sit up as late as she pleased and wear any dress she chose. As it turned out, she pleased to go to bed at midnight and only chose to wear blue taffeta dresses with lace collars, and showed no desire to change her inclinations now that she was back home.

And these were only the things that had reached Scarlett's sickroom. She had no doubt the tally of Bonnie's misbehaviors ran much higher, all under Rhett's indulgent eye. If Bonnie was to have another month alone with her father, while Scarlett and the other children were at Tara, she would be spoiled rotten and there would be no fixing it. The solution presented itself to her mind with the ingenious simplicity of all the best ideas she had had. Bonnie should come to Tara. That way Scarlett and Mammy could keep an eye on her and make sure her wilder tendencies did not develop into habits that would be much harder to break afterwards. And, besides, it was time for Bonnie to visit her mother's home. Hadn't she after all already been taken to see her father's? And while there was no great advantage Charleston held over Atlanta, no matter what the inhabitants of the former would claim, everyone agreed that country air was good for a child.

Yes, she would take Bonnie to Tara. That meant, of course, that Rhett had to come as well or be confronted headlong, for there was no way he would allow his daughter to leave his side. Well, he could come too, she shrugged magnanimously. The part of her that was angry with him would have welcomed the opportunity to do battle again. At times that anger felt just hot enough and precise enough for her to feel this time she could win. But there was another part to her as well, a part that had been in doubt over the last few days and that was secretly pleased by this arrangement.

Why shouldn't he come to Tara? It would have been useful to have him here to keep an eye on the store and the mills, true; for Rhett was so much better at it than Ashley or Henry Hamilton were. But the damage to the business in a month would be minimal, while her husband's accompanying her to Clayton County had social advantages of its own. The town already believed the worst of their marriage after that dreadful incident at the mill and Rhett's sudden departure from Atlanta. God only knew what the spiteful old cats were whispering behind their fans now, since news of her accident and pregnancy must have gotten out. If she went home while Rhett and Bonnie stayed behind, that could only strengthen the impression that they were estranged, especially since she couldn't trust Rhett not to imply as much in her absence. Yes, it would be good for them to leave Atlanta together. They would be presenting a united front for once.

The look on Rhett's face when she'd told him she was going to Tara came to her mind, like it had done so many times during the last days, but she firmly pushed it away. No, that had nothing to do with it. She would invite Rhett to Tara for Bonnie's sake and because it would keep gossip down. If this also turned out to be an opportunity for her to untangle the complicated state of her marriage, she would deal with that when it came to it. She wouldn't think of it now, there was no use in it. She would think of it when they were at Tara.

Yet, despite the familiar injunction, a small part of her mind did wonder what Rhett's face would look like when she told him of her decision. Wouldn't it be nice to have confirmation that she could affect him, now that she knew that he, on some level, cared? Before she would have reveled in the power this gave her over him, in the chance she'd have to hold it over his head like a whip. And now? Now she wasn't quite sure what she planned to do with the knowledge. She only knew that she very much wanted to have it.

::o::o::o::

The plan was simple and Scarlett put it into motion the very next day, while Rhett was out. She carefully laid out the treasures of her vanity and invited Ella and Bonnie to her room. Stung that Bonnie would not let her play with her kitten, Ella had been bragging that she was allowed to play with their mother's jewelry the week before. As a result, Bonnie had been demanding the same privilege for days. Scarlett had been hesitant to grant it, for she privately feared her favorite child would be ill-behaved and Rhett would immediately swoop in to mediate the situation with that knowing, superior light in his eyes that was so unbearable. But he was not here now and this served her quite well. As the girls clapped their hands excitedly and reached for the glittering jewels, Scarlett gently told them of Tara.

Wasn't Tara the loveliest place on earth? There were cousins to play with, a forest to walk through, and an endless supply of kittens from the stables. At that Bonnie furrowed her brow, clearly not taken with the idea that Prince Bertie—her faithful feline companion, christened by Rhett for his whiskers—could stand competition. Oh, but there was more than just kittens at Tara of course, her mother rushed to repair her tactical error. There were tiny, golden chicks, and noisy ducklings, and new colts that came to be petted on their noses. And butterflies, too! If you sat in the sweet-smelling grass in summer and your dress was the same bright color as the flowers around you, butterflies would land on your knees and you could see their painted wings up close. When they were little, Scarlett and her sisters would hold contests about it. The girl with the prettiest frock always drew the most butterflies and was declared their queen. "I want to be queen!" Bonnie proclaimed and her mother smiled brightly down at her and patted her dark curls.

They did make a pretty picture together, Scarlett decided, as she sat in the armchair with the girls on each side of her, peering at the open jewelry box in her lap. She was wearing her favorite wrapper, of purple silk taffeta with delicate green-and-orange embroidery, and with her hair brushed and pinned loosely in place, she looked less like the pale, haunted woman of the last weeks and more like her old self. The girls too were charming in hazel green and blue, and in this light even Ella's dull ginger curls looked pretty. And Scarlett was pleased when she heard Rhett's voice in the hallway, for this was exactly how she had hoped he would find them when he came home.

He smiled when he entered the room and his eyes, which had passed over her with their usual reserve, grew warm when he looked at the girls.

"Daddy!" Bonnie cried, wiggling her way down from the armchair.

Scarlett smiled indulgently at the desertion. It was useful for her plan, of course, but secretly she was pleased that Ella at least had stayed by her side.

"Here, poppet, come give Daddy a kiss. You too, Ella."

With Bonnie in his arms, he extended a hand towards his stepdaughter, who shyly got up and kissed the cheek he lowered to her level.

"Daddy, we go buy a dress!" Bonnie said imperiously, slapping her little hand on his shoulder as if she could physically steer him to the task.

"Another one?" her father replied in mock consternation. "But where shall we put it, princess? Mammy said your closet is so full she can't even close the doors anymore."

He had assumed the serious air he usually had when talking to his daughter. And just as usual was the fact that she ignored his protest and stuck her chin out mutinously.

"I want a new dress!"

"All right, sweetheart," Rhett relented with a grin. "What color should it be then? Green?" he teased, already sure of the answer.

"No, Daddy! Like flowers!" Bonnie frowned. "I want butterflies. And Bertie be the prince of butterflies. Mother, can Bertie come to Tara?" she asked, twisting in Rhett's arms to look at Scarlett.

Over her head, Rhett's eyes had flown to his wife as well, a questioning note in their depths. Scarlett shrugged lightly, a half-smile on her lips, and he frowned.

"No, poppet," he started to tell Bonnie quietly, "listen. We are not going to Tara. We'll stay here with Prince Bertie and Daddy will buy you—"

"I want her to come," Scarlett interjected.

He raised his eyebrows at her words. There was thinly-veiled annoyance on his face now and Scarlett felt a little thrill of victory. She had needled him at last.

"I think it wouldn't do to separate the children again so soon," she said and his mouth went down at the corner. "It would be good for all of them to spend some time at Tara. And it might keep Bonnie from running too wild, as well."

She hadn't been able to resist that last provocation and she could see Rhett's control starting to slip away at it. Before he could strike back, she took a small breath and added lightly, "I thought you might come too."

She had this one advantage over him—she knew what was coming and could watch his face even as she spoke. There was surprise on it at first and, in the short silence that followed, something else as well. A small flame twisted wildly and briefly in his pupils and was gone. Yet even as his face was wiped clean of emotion, there was something sensibly different to it now—as if so far he had been asleep, and all of a sudden he was not. His gaze on her grew sharp and Scarlett, who had been watching him with avid, poorly disguised curiosity, shifted uneasily at the change. Too late she realized that the reason she had been able to watch Rhett so easily these past few days was that he had not been watching her.

"What about your enterprises in Atlanta?" he asked, his eyes not leaving her face.

"Uncle Henry can take care of them," she answered easily, the reply rehearsed in advance.

He watched her for a long moment with dark, speculative eyes that seemed to probe to the back of her mind, and she felt her cheeks beginning to flush under his scrutiny.

"Very well then," Rhett finally said, with a slight bow of his head. "I will make the arrangements."

"Can we buy the dress, Daddy?" Bonnie said, squirming impatiently in his arms.

"Yes, princess," he replied with a smile, his eyes finally leaving Scarlett. "Shall we buy Prince Bertie a crown as well?"

As father and daughter left the room together, Scarlett sank back in the armchair, exhausted. It was done. For better or for worse, it was done. And there _had_ been something in Rhett's face. Her invitation had not left him indifferent. But the nervous energy that had carried her through since the day of Melanie's confession had finally ebbed. She felt depleted and tired, and wished nothing more than to return to her bed. She couldn't think of what it all meant now. She would think of it tomorrow. There was nothing that couldn't wait until tomorrow.

"Mommy… can I have a new dress, too?" Ella's eternally worried voice rose from her side.

Scarlett sighed wearily. "Yes, Ella. Go tell Uncle Rhett you may have a new dress as well."

* * *

 _ **Note** : If you're into that sort of thing, google "silk taffeta dressing gown with Chinese hand embroidery" for Scarlett's attire in the last scene. I'm told the phrase "Ladies at Home: A Peek at Victorian Wrappers" might also lead you to interesting places ;)_


	5. The Long Way Home

_This is the first installment you only have me to blame for, as my usual victims were not around to supervise the final take. If you're curious how the writing/editing process went without them, see the lyrics to Freddie Mercury's Living on My Own (only substitute "writin' fanfic" for "living," AS ONE DOES)._

 _Many thanks as always for your comments on the last chapter. They put a smile on my face and a spring in my... typing fingers. Or something like that. But perhaps something that doesn't sound like I'm also trying to blame you for my typos._

 _ETA: Made a small edit in the chapter, thanks to an observation from LawdyMissScarlett. Thanks, LMS!_

* * *

 **Chapter V: The Long Way Home**

 _"… she had forgotten the Gerald of the last two years, the vague old gentleman who stared at doors waiting for a woman who would never enter. She was remembering the vital, virile old man with his mane of crisp white hair, his bellowing cheerfulness, his stamping boots, his clumsy jokes, his generosity. She remembered how, as a child, he had seemed the most wonderful man in the world, this blustering father who carried her before him on his saddle when he jumped fences, turned her up and paddled her when she was naughty, and then cried when she cried and gave her quarters to get her to hush. She remembered him coming home from Charleston and Atlanta laden with gifts that were never appropriate, remembered too, with a faint smile through tears, how he came home in the wee hours from Court Day at Jonesboro, drunk as seven earls, jumping fences, his rollicking voice raised in 'The Wearin' o' the Green.'" (GWTW Ch. XXXIX)_

* * *

It had been so unexpected she couldn't keep herself from gasping aloud. With her skirts gathered in one gloved hand, she had been on the lower step of the train, a frail, porcelain-delicate figure preparing to follow her husband and alight. It was hard to tell what had moved him to action—the brittle quality her motions had not entirely shed or perhaps the poisoned flicker of a memory playing between the hem of her dress and the iron of the rails—but in any case, instead of merely offering his arm, Rhett had swiftly picked her up before she had time to descend.

At her sharp intake of air, he froze for a second, waiting for any further indication that he'd caused her pain despite the care he'd put in encircling her torso and knees without pressing on her side. According to Dr. Meade, the broken rib had healed, yet the area still retained a slight tenderness to touch—whether out of lasting physical damage or a lingering fear of the flesh, it was hard to tell. But it hadn't been that what had made her gasp.

The last time they'd been so close had been the night of Melanie's party, when Rhett had carried her upstairs, she recalled with a sort of empty, tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach, rising despite the prevailing embarrassment. _No_. It had been after she'd fallen, when he was frantic with fear and calling for help. Her lips pressed into a thin line, she studiously avoided his gaze. It was always like this between them these days. Every time she remembered a close moment they had shared, a dozen nasty memories seemed to rise and embroider themselves on it like black poisonous lace, stifling any tender impulse she might have had towards him.

"Daddy, me too!"

Bonnie's voice cut through the moment, shiny and precise like a silver knife, and Rhett relinquished his hold on his wife, a few steps away from the train. She smoothed her skirts and watched with a frown as he one put one knee down on the train's undoubtedly dirty step to be at his daughters' level.

"Now, girls, each choose one shoulder," he instructed. "Hurry up, you don't want the train to leave with you two still on it, now do you?"

Ella and Bonnie, who were standing next to each other on the top step, immediately complied, his mock threat an added incentive to their enthusiasm. Ella in particular was scared of trains, and the prospect of the black monster closing its doors to swallow her up made her cling to her stepfather's shoulder in a heartbeat. As he picked them up at the same time, they giggled foolishly—Bonnie's, a loud, clear laughter that rang across the tracks and in turn made her father laugh as well; Ella's, a shrill, mousy sound she quickly covered with her hand when she saw the look on her mother's face.

Scarlett turned her head from the family scene, seized by a sudden sense of weariness. After all these weeks of enforced rest, the train journey had tired her more than she cared to admit, both in mind and in body. Spending time in close quarters with her husband, with nowhere to go and no more than five minutes' worth of polite conversation between them, had definitely put a strain on her nerves—for there was a strange tension to their dealings these days, more oppressive than even the forced courtesy of before had been. She had kept her eyes on the window and longed for the train to go faster. Yet the sights that greeted her at the destination did little to improve her mood.

The train station they had left in Atlanta was brand new, built to replace the one that had burned down in 1864. It looked new as well and vaguely impudent, its enormous glass-and-metal arch spread out like a fan between stout red-brick towers topped with improbable steeples. "It looks like London or Paris, drawn by someone who's seen neither," Rhett had drawled mildly at her side, but she ignored him. It looked like gumption and renewal, and money—lots and lots of money. At its side stood the mammoth Kimball House that had risen on the ruins of the Atlanta Hotel the year before. Scarlett had provided the lumber for the massive construction and had tried to convince Rhett to buy bonds for it as well. The interest rate was good and the owner a friend. Rhett had laughed and said that, their marriage apart, he never gave money to swindlers if he could help it. The fight that followed from those words had lasted a week and she could still summon some of its anger in the present day, especially since Kimball House now stood six-story high and was the most sumptuous hotel in all of Atlanta. Just seeing it—and seeing the soot-stained, soaring arch of the train depot—made Scarlett feel better. It made her feel alive, because Atlanta was alive and had pulled through its worst. Everywhere you looked, you saw signs of irrepressible activity, of life refusing to be cowed or beaten down, of a present too hurried to ever sit back and reflect on its past.

There was little of that in Jonesboro. The shabby wooden shelter that had greeted Scarlett when she came home for Gerald's funeral—came home _pregnant_ , her mind registered with a pang—was still standing. Its sides had been reinforced and it no longer sported empty kegs for benches, but the gulf between this rickety construction and the depot that had burned down during the war stood plain and painful in her mind. All along the main street there were empty lots where familiar buildings had stood, decaying houses that had received shells through their roofs or sidewalls and would never be alive again. In Jonesboro there was nothing to keep the past from returning; no bustling, hard-working, glittering present to keep its ghosts at bay; and the small tear in the fabric of her life that Ashley's words had caused that day at the lumber yard, the small tear that had been all but obscured by the wounds she had incurred since, threatened to reopen.

Floating over the image of this defeated, lifeless village was the image of old Jonesboro on Court Day, of Gerald barreling down the main street on his big hunter, a cloud of red dust rising up like smoke in his wake, of Stuart and Brent laughing recklessly at her like they had that summer before the war when she had flirted madly with them and gotten them to fall in love with her. She shook her head to clear it of those memories—for they were foolish, foolish thoughts to have right now—and made her way hurriedly under the wooden roof.

As the train chuffed its departure, the girls joined her in the shade, followed by Mammy's scolding voice, elaborating on one of its favorite themes—the insidiousness of freckles. Rhett was busy tipping the men that had unloaded their luggage. In this kind of situation, Wade usually chose to stay by his stepfather's side—to learn the latest in gentlemanly conduct, as Rhett liked to put it—but this time he silently followed his sisters.

If Scarlett had not been absorbed by her own thoughts, this small gesture would have irritated her, because she knew the cause of Wade's sullenness and was powerless to order it away. The boy had asked her last week why his stepfather had to come to Tara and there had been obvious displeasure flashing in his brown eyes, despite the softly stammering tone of his words. Scarlett had been taken aback, for this was as forward a question as her son had ever asked. And then she understood, suddenly and in a flash. Wade had heard Rhett's confession that night and God only knew what he must have made of it! But this revelation only served to make her acutely uncomfortable and embarrassed. She had raised her voice at the boy for being disrespectful to his elders and Wade had immediately retreated into his shell, like a glum little turtle. She had mismanaged that situation, she realized afterwards, but she didn't know what she could do about it. She couldn't possibly broach such a mortifying subject with her son. This was exactly the sort of problem she would have normally delegated to Rhett, and she cursed him bitterly for making that impossible now.

Peace on the platform only lasted for a few moments, exactly as long as it took for Bonnie to get bored with the small group and leap out of their grasp to go looking for her father. Moving as fast as her short legs could carry her, to avoid being captured by her mother or Mammy, she came precariously close to the last moving cars of the train. Ella let out an alarmed shriek, hiding her face in her mother's skirts. Scarlett looked up and her heart constricted when she saw the small silhouette profiled against the leviathan contours of the train. She swiftly started towards her daughter, but Rhett was faster. His long legs blocked Bonnie's way and he picked her up, taking her with him as he settled the deal with the would-be porters.

"That child gonna run straight to her death one day. She ain't listening to nobody," Mammy preached as her mistress made her way back with the needlessly hurried steps of one who returns empty-handed. Rhett's eyes followed her from a distance, an unreadable light in their dark depths. One corner of his mouth went down and he started to whisper something in his daughter's ear.

Though she frowned at Mammy's words, Scarlett knew they held some truth. It was not that Bonnie didn't listen; it was that the only person who could make her listen would not do so. Rhett had not even admonished Bonnie for this, she realized with a mixture of anger and dejection. Even more, he had not returned the girl to her care, as if in silent pronouncement of her fault in the present situation.

He thought she was a bad mother. She shrank from that knowledge, for beyond it lay the contours of vile and terrible things that had been said and done between them. She couldn't bear to think of them now, just like she couldn't let her mind contemplate the idea that a tragedy could have happened before her eyes and she would have been powerless to stop it. She tried to quickly focus back on Rhett's faults instead, and it was, as usual, a success. She was glad she had insisted Bonnie come to Tara and this incident only strengthened her conviction. Allowing Rhett to spoil his daughter for another month would have been entirely the wrong decision. There would have been no taming the child after that.

Why couldn't Bonnie be a little more like her sister? True, Ella was a little scatterbrained and not everything a child her age should be. But she had a sweet disposition and was generally well-behaved. Even now, she'd gone of her own accord to sit on the bench inside the shelter and quietly wait for the adults. Scarlett gave her a small approving smile and sat down beside her. Ella grinned back and slid her small hand into her mother's. And somehow, for the first time since the train had arrived in Jonesboro, Scarlett felt a little better.

Over the last weeks, there had been moments when she found Ella's clinginess tiring and annoying. She had rolled her eyes whenever she saw the little girl enter her room, her favorite story book clasped religiously to her chest, and had sighed heartily at all of her silly questions. Even small triumphs, like teaching Ella how to count to fifteen, had been somehow lackluster. For at times Scarlett couldn't help but feel that they were a mere consolation prize for something far more valuable she had been robbed of, something she had wanted dearly and failed to keep. But now, as she looked down at her daughter's small shoulders, she was seized by a sudden rush of sympathy. She wished she could find something nice to tell Ella, but as hard as she tried, nothing came to mind. How was it that other people always knew what to say, and she couldn't manage one word?

But before she could muse further on the unequal distribution of eloquence in the world, Bonnie and Rhett approached the bench. Taking a quick glance at Ella's and Scarlett's entwined hands, Rhett pinched his stepdaughter's cheek and addressed her in his mock-serious tone.

"Why, Miss Ella, did you know your father used to own this town?"

Scarlett could barely keep herself from rolling her eyes. Besides the fact that it was a barefaced lie—old Frank might have owned more property than anyone in Jonesboro or indeed the County, but he'd never owned the entire village—she could not understand this habit Rhett had of mentioning Frank and Charles to their children. "They should always feel they know their fathers even if they haven't had a chance to meet them," he'd said when she'd asked him about it once. "And you, my dear, should try talking about Charles or Frank sometimes without rolling your eyes. Children care about these things." She had seen little wisdom in that and had ignored him. Yet perhaps there had been something to it, for Ella was clearly impressed by Rhett's question. Her eyes were round like coins and she shook her head eagerly.

"It's true, though" Rhett said, earnestness written on every line of his face. "I was just telling your sister that we are really in Ella's kingdom now."

Ella looked around her, fairly glowing at this pronouncement; and Scarlett, who had been on the point of correcting Rhett, held her tongue. Why hadn't she thought of that small lie that made the child's eyes shine as if she'd received a treasure? It made sense for a little girl to want to hear charming nonsense like that. Gerald himself had had an endless repertory of flattering white lies to tell his daughters. She hadn't known for sure her grandfather was not the king of Ireland until she was ten, and even then Gerald had tried to claim that was only because the Orangemen had usurped his throne! A small lump rose in her throat as the image of Gerald, waving his hand to conjure the rolling green hills of Ireland for his daughter, pushed its way to the surface. Oh Pa, dear blustering Pa!

"We should go and see if Will isn't waiting for us already," she started to rise from the bench, hurriedly trying to smother the emotion.

"No, please wait." Rhett's voice was somber and she looked up at him in surprise. "Bonnie has something to tell you before we go."

At his side, Bonnie was twisting her foot nervously. She was uncharacteristically quiet, her eyes fixed on the ground. Whatever it was, it was fairly obvious she would rather not say it.

"Bonnie, what do you have to say to your mother?" Rhett asked her carefully.

"I aaam… sorry?"

It came out as a clear question; with the words dragged out so long one could have assumed she was in fact exaggerating her father's drawling vowels for comic effect. Scarlett had to fight to keep a small smile from reaching her lips.

"For what?" Rhett pressed on in the same careful tone.

"Fooor…running?" the battle of the long vowels went on.

"And? What else?"

Bonnie thought for a few seconds, frowning slightly at the question.

"And a kiss!" she proclaimed and promptly delivered to her mother's cheek. Her sudden grin was so infectious, and looked so much like her grandfather's, that Scarlett could not help but smile back at her.

"Well, I am sure your mother appreciates it, but I think she was rather waiting for you to say you won't do it again."

Bonnie shook her head forcefully, her black curls flying every which way. Scarlett murmured a few words of approval to her daughter and then her gaze caught Rhett's as she looked up. There was something of the old keen glint in his eyes, as if he was silently waiting for her reaction. She'd seen that strange, watchful expression on his face a couple of times over the last days, and on both occasions she had quickly averted her eyes, torn between irritation and fluster. But now she smiled uncertainly up at him and it was Rhett that hastily looked away.

"Come on, girls, let's go find your uncle Will," he said. "No, sweetheart, no more running for you. Don't let go of my hand."

Will had come with two wagons from Tara, for Rhett had telegrammed that they'd be arriving with considerable luggage. Scarlett usually brought gifts for her sister and nieces when she came to visit, but this time it was Rhett and Bonnie who had done the shopping, at the last minute, and they were both inclined to lavishness. They waited on the side of the dusty red road, as Will threw his straw hat on the seat and made his way to them in a heavy gait that favored his good leg. His greetings were mild and understated, like Will himself was, but there was something of subtle warmth and comfort suddenly infusing the scene. He kissed Scarlett's cheek and patted Wade's shoulder, and they both looked at him with restored lights in their eyes.

Wade had always gotten along well with Will, for, apart from Rhett himself, Will had been the first true masculine presence in his life. He could remember the days they'd spent together at Tara, when Will was still too weak to help around the house and had watched the children, his skillful bony hands whittling out little toys for them. A little man with a funny top hat, a sturdy horse with a golden wooden mane, a tiny sword that resembled his grandfather's—those had been Wade's first toys and they had been made by Will. His sullenness forgotten, Wade now attached himself to his uncle's side and nodded eagerly when Will said they'd have to find some work at Tara for such a big boy as he was.

As for Scarlett, she felt like a hard knot in her chest had started to ease. Just seeing Will was enough for her heart to remember that Tara was just a short ride away now. And there was something so familiar and reassuring about his bony frame and blond-pinkish hair. Will was family. He was more her family than even her own sisters were, because it was his love of the land and silent competence that kept Tara alive in her absence. She could never see his lanky silhouette waiting for her in front of the station at Jonesboro without silently thanking God that, in His Grace, he had not allowed Will Benteen to collapse on someone else's doorstep after the war.

The girls were introduced to him, for he had not seen Ella since she was a baby and Bonnie he had not met at all. Rhett came forward to shake Will's hand and insisted he be called by his Christian name. His face had its rare air of seriousness and Scarlett released a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding. She didn't think she could have borne it if Rhett decided to be his nasty, mocking self to Will. Of course Rhett had already met her brother-in-law at their wedding and claimed to like the man. But one never knew with him, for he so often derived perverse pleasure out of antagonizing people he had cultivated in the past

The trunks and boxes were quickly loaded into the small wagon, driven by one of Will's hired hands. Wade insisted to help his Uncle Will with the loading and then he climbed in the big wagon with Ella and Mammy, Prince Bertie in a closed wicker basket at their feet. Scarlett was helped onto the seat by her husband and the big saddled horse tied at the back of Will's wagon, the only horse fit for riding they had at Tara, was brought forward for him. He made a move to pick up his daughter, but Bonnie had been on a horse before, and she'd never been on the front seat of a wagon, so she resisted and had to be deposited in her mother's arms.

And finally they were off. As Will clucked to the horse and the wagon made its way up the street, a glint of orangey red caught Scarlett's eyes across the tracks. It was Jonesboro's new courthouse, a square two-story building with a low-hipped roof that glowed almost white in the scorching sun of August. It wasn't much and, though it had been in place for two years now, she'd forgotten about it when casting her eyes over the desolate lots of the village. But now it seemed to smile encouragingly at her, to say that this place too had known renewal.

"See that red house over there, darling?" she pointed to her daughter. "It was born the same year you were."

Through her words trickled the light of a summer morning long gone, when a proud Irish gentleman had held his eldest daughter on his knee as their train approached Atlanta and told her the town was exactly the same age as she was. The little girl had gasped in wonder and enthusiasm, as did Bonnie in her mother's arms.

* * *

 _ **Note** : If this kind of stuff amuses you, here are some background details for this chapter. Atlanta's second Union Station was finished in 1871 to replace the "old rickety, inhospitable car shed" that had taken the place of the first Union Station burned down by Sherman in 1864. (The quote is from April 1871, from an Atlanta newspaper, which also describes the new construction as "capacious and magnificent.") The depot was in Second Empire style or a local approximation of it (hence Rhett's uncharitable comment), and was built by Belgian-American Max Corput, who had also built... the courthouse in Jonesboro in 1869. Jonesboro had also lost its train depot in 1864, but didn't get a proper new one until 1880, when a depot from Barnesville was dismantled and rebuilt over there. I think that building is now the Road to Tara Museum._

 _As for Kimball House, it was built by this fascinating, larger-than-life character, Hannibal Kimball, who would have totally been among Scarlett's Carpetbagger friends. People described him as a "steam engine in breeches" who could convince anyone who had money to invest it in his schemes. Anyone but Rhett Butler, Bugsie decided. Which was just as well, because Kimball went bankrupt in the fall of 1871 and had to leave Atlanta before the year was out. His bond holders lost out. Interestingly, the man who described all these events, putting a largely positive spin on Kimball's career, was Eugene Muse Mitchell, MM's father. So it all comes full circle. Isn't the internet fun?_


	6. Sleeping Arrangements

_I wanted to post this next Monday, but thought I might as well post it halfway between the last chapter and the next, so here I am. Chapter 7 will now go up on August 24th and we'll be back to our weekly updates after that. This installment has given me some trouble, but it had a fairy godmother to fix it, in the form of the amazing iso, and a fairy godmother to coo over it, in the form of lovely SJ. Both of these ladies also had birthdays last week, so I would dedicate this update to them if I hadn't already made them work for it._

 _I know you're all waiting for Scarlett and Rhett to air their issues with each other and/or make out, but we're not there yet. It's all baby steps. But hopefully there's enough S &R (direct and indirect) interaction in this chapter to make it worth your while. There will be more of it in the next, and more of Suellen as well. Your comments are what make it worth MY while, so thank you for the feedback on the last chapter. (*blows on her fingernails, polishes them on lapels* Smooth, huh?)_

* * *

 **Chapter VI: Sleeping Arrangements**

 _"'I shall lock my door every night!'_

 _'Why bother? If I wanted you, no lock would keep me out.'" (GWTW Ch. LI)_

* * *

They were traveling through two different landscapes. The sides of the road were plentiful with deep green bushes, dappled with red where blackberries had ripened on their branches, pinpricked with gold where the sun emerged victorious from their shelter. But the fields beyond them were empty. They had once been green with undulating rows of cotton plants and they now rolled sickly brown where tufts of broomsedge had already been seared by the dry heat of August. From place to place the forest had started to reclaim its own, runty dark pines spreading like arms from its edges to cover old cotton fields and charred house foundations alike.

The latter view would have disheartened Scarlett had she paid any attention to it. But her mind was otherwise occupied. She kept stealing glances at her husband, as he rode beside the wagon slowly as not to stir the road's dust. In less than an hour they'd be at Tara and faced with a problem that had been nagging her ever since she'd asked Rhett to travel with them. Where was he to sleep? The obvious answer would have been in her room, but with the exception of that one wild night after Melanie's party, they hadn't shared a bed in so long. The very thought of Rhett in her childhood bedroom sent a strange, anxious flutter to her stomach. But not to have him there would mean she'd have to find a discreet way to ask Suellen to move him to a different room and stand her cattily questioning gaze.

Then again, Suellen might not see anything amiss in it. Embarrassing as it was to think of it, some ardent husbands did have to sleep somewhere else for a few months after their wives had given birth or been sick. And sometimes couples slept separately at a doctor's orders, as she knew was the case with Ashley and Melanie. Besides, she could always claim it was fashionable for wealthy spouses to keep separate suites even when traveling. Suellen was so desperate to be fashionable and had so little opportunity for it in Clayton County.

No, the problem was Bonnie. Rhett sleeping in a different room could be fine. Rhett sleeping in a different room with Bonnie would surely make Suellen smile and throw arrogant glances in her direction. Suellen loved nothing more than to feel superior to people and she would gloat at this confirmation that she was a better mother than Scarlett. After all, her two daughters both slept in the nursery and Will had never been one to question his wife's domestic reign.

What an unbearable thing that would be, to have Suellen give herself airs over her marriage and offspring! It would almost be better to have Rhett in her room than go through all of that. But would he even be amenable to it? She had a fair idea that, were she to ask him, he'd make some nasty comment and humiliate her thoroughly. But if they were placed together, perhaps he would not say anything, and then she could feign indifference and let him stay. And if she was conciliatory on that front, he might be willing to come up with a solution for Bonnie that wouldn't embarrass her in front of Suellen. The logic was sound, as far as logic went, yet the idea of spending so much time alone with Rhett after all that had happened between them made Scarlett almost painfully nervous. Oh, what a mess everything was! Why hadn't she thought of that before inviting him to Tara?

In her arms, Bonnie had grown restless. For the first half hour of their journey, her mother had told her the names of the flowers trailing the roadsides and Uncle Will had let her hold the slack end of the reins after they left his hands. But Bonnie had long been permitted to hold the reins of her father's horse when they rode together, his big hands covering hers, and Scarlett was now silent, so she twisted every which way in boredom until she found herself a new source of amusement: the lace-trimmed ribbons of her mother's summer bonnet.

Scarlett had in fact regretted taking the bonnet, for its fashionably slender form, though worn low on the forehead, did less to shield her from the sun than any of her wide-brimmed sun hats would have. Yet now her daughter's grasp threatened to bring the jaunty confection down altogether. Awakened from her thoughts, she tried to pry the child's fingers away, but they were hopelessly enmeshed in the green lace below her jaw, and getting more so with every blind attempt to extricate them.

"Would you like me to try?" Rhett inquired from her side, just as she was starting to huff in frustration. She didn't look at him, but thought she heard a smile in his deep voice, and so she nodded curtly, pursing her lips. "Just hold her hand for me."

Reins thrown negligently across one arm, he leaned sideways in his saddle and, as Scarlett held Bonnie's wrist, deftly disentangled her fingers from the lace. Scarlett stood perfectly still, holding her breath, as his knuckles brushed briefly by her jaw before he finally released the ribbon. He looked down at his daughter with a smile.

"There you go, princess, you're free. And what a pretty picture you make."

Scarlett looked at him then and, though he tweaked Bonnie's curls as he spoke, she rather thought he was smiling at her, Scarlett, when he straightened in his saddle. The light in his eyes didn't die as he caught her gaze either, and her own eyelashes started to flutter delicately, almost by their own volition. But she was not the only one that had noticed Rhett's smile. Wade had seen it as well, and his voice rose loud and clear over the sound of wheels and hooves.

"Uncle Will, were you in the war right from the start?"

Scarlett ignored the question as so much noise, but Rhett's face changed at it. He looked behind her with a raised eyebrow, something like grim amusement in his eyes, and then he turned to face the dusty red road again.

::o::o::o::

The tangled mock-orange hedge of the Macintosh property came into view and then, at the top of the hill, Tara. Wheels creaking in protest, the wagons finally turned on the long, graveled driveway to the house; the cool dark shade of the cedars closing over them like a pair of soothing hands. When they emerged again into the light, they were at home. There it was, Tara, gleaming white from among old, solid oaks that clasped its sides into a gentle embrace. Its lawn swelled a valiantly green wave under the hot sun, rising into the deeper emerald and foamy white of the cape jessamine bushes by the porch. The crepe myrtle trees on each side of the stairs were in full bloom, a riot of pink against the whitewashed walls, and the lightness that had been building under Scarlett's breastbone for a mile finally resolved itself into a smile of relief. She was home.

"Look, darling, this is Tara! The prettiest house in the world," she whispered to Bonnie.

Suellen was waiting for them at the top of the stairs, her two daughters by her side. The eldest, christened Susan Geraldine and known to all as Susie, was a tall, slender girl who had inherited her mother's long nose and thin lips. She had—even at this age, for she was slightly younger than Ella—a slightly affected air about her that Scarlett recognized as an unmistakable echo of Suellen and consequently disliked. She liked her youngest niece much better and with good reason, too, for Sollie Benteen, christened Solange Elinor, was a lovable child. She had Will's pinkish hair and Suellen's light, almost colorless complexion, but her cheeks were round, her eyes impishly green, and her temper the happiest medium between those of her parents. She was, at three years of age, the uncontested darling of the County.

The two families came together on the front porch in a din of bright feminine voices, crossing each other quickly like flashes of slender, shiny swords. "Scarlett, what a pretty little bonnet!" "You remember Ella Lorena. Ella, curtsy like I taught you!" "Captain Butler, Mr. Benteen and I are honored to welcome you to our home." "Oh, the darling blue eyes, just like Pa's!" "I swear you've grown ten inches since I last saw you, young lady!" The words flowed lightly and gaily in the summer air, disguising any tension of renewed familiarity.

For their part, the adults performed admirably. No one could have guessed that Scarlett, who exclaimed brightly over her nieces' prettiness, had been stung by their mother's sovereign attitude towards Tara and registered with catty satisfaction that she seemed to have lost her figure. Or, for that matter, that Suellen, who smiled and preened at Rhett's smoothly drawled compliments, had many a time consoled herself with the thought that she, at least, had not married a Scallawag and had, on one momentous, unfortunate occasion, said as much to Scarlett. The children were less successful at hiding their inner selves. Wade had almost immediately vanished from the porch to help Will unload the wagons; Susie and Ella eyed each other with the beginning of mutual dislike; and Sollie Benteen almost made her cousin Bonnie cry.

In Sollie's defense, it was mostly the excitement of the day that had caught up with Bonnie, as she sat bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked in her father's arms. But there was also something about the little girl who stood next to Rhett and said "I'm Sollie Benteen. What is your name?" in a matter-of-fact voice, extending her hand upwards as if to shake hers, that rather startled Bonnie. She had never been shy with adults and felt perfectly at home in their world—a world of cooing and smiling, pinching of cheeks and tweaking of curls. In the world of children she only ever participated on her own terms, her father always at hand to smooth away its edges and extract her from its midst when it got tiresome. This was one of those occasions, Bonnie decided and turned into Rhett's arms to whisper that she wanted to go home.

But the unthinkable happened. Instead of marching to his horse, her trusted ally crouched down to set her on her feet and encouraged her to talk to the little girl in front of her. Stunned by the unforeseen betrayal, Bonnie repeated her request in a louder voice, already carrying in it the warning signs of tantrum. Her mother threw them a sharp glance, to which her father shrugged lightly. His soft-spoken promises about the charms of Tara only got him a plaintively stubborn "But I don't want to stay here! I want to go home now, Daddy," as did a rather feeble attempt to invoke train schedules, so in the end he switched to different tactics.

"All right then, let's go find the horse. We'll go home and Ella and your cousins can look at the presents without us."

That stopped Bonnie short, for she had already been promised that the pile of gifts would hold pleasant surprises for her as well. She peeked at Sollie, who was now watching her with the uniquely disdainful air more accomplished children reserve for their juniors, and shook her head slightly.

"You don't want that?" her father said silkily. "Perhaps we can unwrap the presents now and decide what to do after that then?"

And so it was that Rhett Butler spent his first hour at Tara exclaiming over stuffed toys and tiny frocks in the company of four young ladies, not one of whom was over the age of five. Scarlett was annoyed by this turn of events, yet grateful that at least Bonnie had been kept from a full-fledged tantrum. Suellen would have surely been nastily condescending about that, especially given how well-behaved and unfussy her own Sollie was. But as it was, Suellen smiled indulgently at Rhett and the children as she showed them into the cooler, smaller parlor at the back of the house to unwrap the presents, and promised she would give Captain Butler a tour of Tara before supper.

"Poor little child," she exclaimed, as she and Scarlett made their way upstairs to supervise the unpacking of trunks. Suellen accepted all gifts to her daughters and herself as if they were her due, but she was rarely in the room when they were first opened—to avoid having to say thank you, Scarlett had always peevishly thought.

"It's such a difficult age," Suellen continued, "and with her problem, too. Have you tried putting a verbena sachet under her pillow, Scarlett? Susie and Sollie sleep wonderfully, so I haven't had need of it myself, but I heard it helps with night terrors. It wouldn't keep the other children awake either—the way a lamp does."

Scarlett peered at her sharply, too surprised to even feel annoyed at the unmistakable tones of maternal superiority. How could Suellen know about Bonnie's nightmares or fear of the dark? She couldn't decide what to say, but it looked as if Suellen was happy to have imparted her knowledge with no expectation of reply. She made her way briskly down the corridor, as the servants carried trunks under Mammy's supervision. The doors of some bedrooms were open, the soft light of their curtained windows revealing inviting, freshly made beds. They were now approaching the hour when rest was made almost necessity by the merciless heat of August. Soon the children would come upstairs for their afternoon naps and the house would be silent and drowsy.

"We put Captain Butler in my old room and Bonnie in Carreen's," Suellen turned and gestured to doors on her left. "I trust you will find the arrangement to your liking. Captain Butler wrote to William last week that he didn't want to impose on us even more and would be happy to share the room with his daughter. It was nasty of you, Scarlett, to let him think Tara was a farm or a hovel, that we couldn't give the girl her own room!"

There was real indignation in her eyes as she spoke and Scarlett, though taken aback by the words, remembered why she had so often felt like slapping her sister when they were growing up. But deeper and more biting than irritation at Suellen and her self-absorbed airs was a sudden, vague annoyance with her husband that she couldn't entirely explain to herself. She had had her wish. Rhett had somehow managed to write ahead and obtain separate bedrooms for the two of them and a solution to the impending nursery crisis Bonnie's tantrums were—and had done it tactfully enough not to elicit malicious barbs from Suellen, though perhaps not cunningly enough as to recreate their arrangement at home in its original form. Bonnie would have to sleep in her own room now, so her aunt Suellen could demonstrate the full refinement of her hospitality.

It was everything she had wanted and yet it was almost as if she was disappointed by it, she mused when she was finally alone in her room, waiting for Mammy to come unlace her stays for her afternoon rest. Disappointed? No, that was entirely the wrong word. But after all the mental energy she had put into finding a solution, it _was_ a little deflating to learn that Rhett had been ahead of her and solved the problem before they even left Atlanta. And she could not even fault him for not telling her he had done so. It would have helped her with Suellen—and thank God she hadn't said anything stupid and betrayed herself before she could piece together what had happened!—but it would have been such a distasteful conversation to have with him. No, it was better that he hadn't said anything. She wouldn't say anything about it either. He must never suspect she'd thought he would take this chance to stay in her room and had been prepared to let him, if only for appearances' sake.

And this arrangement did please her well, she thought, turning into a circle to take stock of all the dear familiar shapes around her. The curtains billowing slightly in the light wind, the bright, colorful patches of the rugs on the hardwood floors, the armchair Charles Hamilton had once spent his night on, her lovely bed with its pristine covers. There'd be no Rhett here to disturb this peace with his dark, prying eyes and mocking words. No Rhett to make her flustered and annoyed. Yes, that pleased her very well indeed.


	7. Robillard Women

_I am hopeless at keeping my own schedule, but I figured no one will care if I update slightly early. This is a chapter I became quite fond of along the way and I can't help but hope that you will like it as well. My gratitude to iso, SJ, and everyone who left a kind word on the last installment. There will be some sulky Wade in the next one, but I also have a very busy week ahead of me, so you know, send this stress eater some bonbons and hope for the best._

* * *

 **Chapter VII: Robillard Women**

 _"'Suellen ain't as bad as you think, Scarlett. I think we'll get along right well. The only trouble with Suellen is that she needs a husband and some children and that's just what every woman needs.'" (GWTW Ch. XXXIX)_

* * *

The clear, still waters of sleep suddenly parted above her head and she was awake. The sun had started to dip towards the horizon and that miraculous stillness of country twilights—the silent hour when an arrested world bows its head to receive the advent of night—was not far away now either. But Scarlett didn't feel like one who had awoken on the cusp of evening. She felt refreshed and rested like she hadn't been in months and, as she stretched her arms above her head, she wondered hazily why she hadn't come home sooner. She always asked herself that on her rare visits to Tara, yet this time had a poignancy all its own, born from the torment of the last months in Atlanta.

Mammy came out of the dressing room, a cotton voile dress in dark green draped over her arm, and Scarlett reluctantly rose from the bed to don her stays. They had to be laced so loosely after her injury that they did little more than follow the lines of her body, but even with this dispensation she sighed in some dismay at her image in the mirror. The dress had a rather low, square décolletage that she had always thought framed her neck charmingly and made it seem longer. But now the smooth, white expanse of her upper chest was disrupted by sharply protruding collarbones and her breasts no longer filled the bodice to plumpness. She looked almost as she had after the war and it was startling to think that illness could ravage a body so quickly and thoroughly. Frowning delicately while Mammy fixed her hair, she drew a length of white chiffon over her décolletage to disguise the new gauntness.

When she finally came out of her room, Rhett was leaving his.

"Why, hello," he said. He'd changed his clothes as well and his hair curled ever so slightly at his nape as if he'd just washed off the dust of the road. Yet even thus refreshed, the deep, dark circles under his eyes that had been there every day for the last month abided still, as if they were carved permanently into his face by now—a small but noticeable dent in the bronze profile of a coin.

Scarlett was slightly uneasy at the sight of him and wished Mammy hadn't lingered behind in her bedroom. She had so rarely been truly alone with Rhett—no children or servants to witness and mediate their interactions—after that fateful day on the stairs.

"Hello," she offered in a guardedly casual tone, when no salvation from Mammy seemed forthcoming. "Are the children still asleep?"

"Ella is napping in the nursery, with her cousins. Wade is outside with Will. And, as of twenty minutes ago, Bonnie is finally asleep and no longer intent on getting us on the first train back to Atlanta."

He smiled at that, but the knowledge that he must have spent his whole afternoon pacifying Bonnie, while she had been enjoying her rest, only added to Scarlett's discomfort and her own smile grew vague and artificial.

"Now," Rhett said, raising his eyebrows, "I believe I was promised a tour of this house?"

"Oh, yes. Could you believe Suellen's nerve?" Scarlett launched herself with relish into one of the few topics whose aggravation outweighed her present unease without being in some way contentious to their marriage. "Why, to hear her talk when we arrived, you'd think I was a guest here and Tara was all hers! When she wouldn't even have a roof over her head if it wasn't for me. Even now the house is almost entirely run with my money!"

The money that went into Tara these days was mostly Rhett's, as Scarlett had gladly taken his offer from their honeymoon and kept her own funds intact over the years, but he let the point pass.

"You know what the good Book says: the elder shall serve the younger. Though your sister might choose to read that particular story differently, of course." A ghost of the old mocking light danced briefly in his eyes as he spoke and was gone. "But, subtler exegetical points aside, she's not here now, is she?"

Scarlett peered up at him in confusion and then something in the slight quizzical tilt of his lips triggered comprehension. He wanted her to give him a tour of the house. It was not what she had expected, but well—it would have been the natural choice if they came to Tara together under different, less strained circumstances. If he wanted to act as if they were a normal couple, she would rise to the occasion.

"Oh. Yes, of course," she said, clearing her throat to disguise sudden nervousness. "Well, there is not much to see on this floor. It's all bedrooms. That's my mother and father's room in the middle. Will and Suellen have it now. The nursery. A guest room where Suellen put Wade. The back stairs. And then here, Suellen's old bedroom, where you're sleeping, of course, and Carreen's old bedroom, which is now Bonnie's."

"And your bedroom in the middle," he added quietly.

She looked at him from the corner of her eye, searching for hidden maliciousness behind the comment, but his face was smooth and unreadable. Still, she was uncomfortably reminded of the fact Rhett had made sure they would have separate rooms at Tara—and pushed the thought down with vigor.

"And my bedroom, yes," she said briskly, turning on her heels. "We should go downstairs now. Before Suellen finds us, that is," she added, throwing him a tentative look over her shoulder. They hadn't been on the same side of a joke—no matter how feeble—in a very long time, longer even than their current marital discord. Her words hung in the air for a second like on the scale of an invisible balance, and then Rhett's lips curled up in a faint conspiring smile and he gestured for her to lead the way to the first floor.

She started the tour with the front parlor and went to draw aside the heavy curtains that had been keeping the day's heat out. Rhett followed and quietly closed the door behind them. There was a blink of darkness as one source of light was extinguished; then she unlatched the shutters and the light of the slanting sun rushed around her shoulders to pool velvety into the room. The parlor was the nicest-looking room in the house, thanks to her own efforts, and there was a hint of proud anticipation in her chest as she turned to see Rhett's reaction to it. But instead of admiring his surroundings, he was examining the slashed portrait hanging above the fireplace.

"Your illustrious grandmother, I presume," he said without turning.

"Yes, this is— _was_ Solange Robillard," she said, coming to stand beside him in front of the mantelpiece.

She looked up at the painted woman with her breasts half-bared, which somehow drew more attention to them now for having been pierced by Yankee bayonets, at her lustrous dark hair piled up high and the haughty sneer forever frozen on her refined features; and a warm rush of energy went through her veins, as if she'd taken a sip of brandy. She smiled suddenly. Every time she looked at Solange's portrait, she felt as if she partook in the bold, unashamed strength of a time long gone.

"You have her eyes—almost," Rhett said in a softer voice and she looked at him curiously. Solange's eyes had the same slight tilt to them as her own, but they were too dark, and too cold, for the resemblance to be often remarked upon.

"Were you thinking of having it restored?" he asked, peering at the bayonet marks.

"No," Scarlett said reluctantly and moved away from the fireplace. The direction of his gaze had suddenly unsettled her, and she discreetly adjusted the chiffon higher against her throat. "Suellen wanted it. She makes so much of her Prudhomme and Robillard blood these days. I think she shows that portrait to everyone who comes to visit. And she named Sollie after Grandma Robillard as well. So of course she wanted it restored."

"But you didn't."

"No. It would have been so much trouble, and who knows what it would have looked like at the end. And I thought—" She paused and offered the truth with a shrug. "I thought we shouldn't be restoring it. It felt like it wasn't right somehow after everything that happened to it."

He turned his head to watch her, as she'd retreated to the soft shadows near the door, and there was a faint glint of interest in his dark eyes.

"Papering over past wounds rarely is," he said. "The danger is not even that it will be done poorly and you will get to see the mended places in front of your eyes as long as you live. The danger is that it will be done well and you won't be able to see them at all. So many people don't, just look around you. And for that they'll have it break again and again in their hands along the very fault lines they struggled to keep invisible." He smiled a little at the look of startled curiosity on her face. "I am sorry, do go on."

"I don't know. I—uh—I'd just rather have it like this, so I can—" she stopped, unsure of what she was trying to say. She didn't know what had made Rhett talk to her like that, without cold formality or the sharp edge of sarcasm, but it was nice, like an echo of times imperceptibly gone by between them. Yet her mind only picked its way slowly and hesitantly along the deep furrows of his sentences. She knew he was not talking about the portrait anymore and she had the vague feeling she should disagree with what he was saying, but the pieces didn't quite line up in her head. She couldn't decide who the people he was talking about were and whether they were sensible or not. She couldn't even decide what her own particular decision amounted to, for it was instinct, not logic that had led her to it in the first place.

"So you can have a testament of all you've lived through and, in your case, vanquished," Rhett finished the sentence for her.

Yes, she nodded. Yes, that was a better way of talking about it and one she could grasp. She did feel there was something of a testament in the bayonet slashes that now marred the painting, in the way that they had failed to destroy it and were now almost part of the story it told. She liked how Solange's cold, disdainful gaze seemed to have expanded to include them as well, as if to say "You cannot touch me."

Yet there was something startling and almost doubly defiant about the portrait in its present surroundings. For it was the only thing in the room to which that line of thinking had applied, the only object that still acknowledged past suffering. The rest of the parlor had been meticulously restored to its state from before the war. The rosewood sofa was back in its place, as were the two big, upholstered chairs where Gerald and Ellen used to sit in the evenings. Slimmer, svelte-legged chairs and sparse hassocks dappled the moss-green carpet outside their circle; and the marble-topped mahogany table stood massive and forbidding in a corner, frowning at the square piano and bric-a-brac stand on the other side of the room. Everything in here was as it had been when Ellen was alive, except that not half of these things were Ellen's. They were things her eldest daughter had bought to undo at least some of her losses.

It was three years now since Scarlett had thrown herself—and her new husband's money—into the task of refurbishing Tara. She had long been dreaming of replacing the furnishings destroyed by Yankee soldiers or worn out by daily use. Lots of furniture auctioned off from old plantation houses sometimes made their way to Frank's store and her heart always lurched painfully in her chest when she caught glimpse of the occasional mahogany or rosewood piece that was identical with what they'd had at home before the war. She could never keep those pieces for Tara, for they were invariably expensive, and would not allow herself the weakness to move them to the back of the store and delay their inevitable departure. Yet she always felt like crying when they were sold.

With Rhett's fortune firmly backing her, she could finally keep pieces like that when they arrived at the store and hunt for others as well as she was choosing the furniture for her Peachtree mansion. It had been an unexpected battle getting Will to receive financial help for Tara, but this much he accepted with almost no protest, as if understanding the importance attached to it in her mind. Rhett had helped as well. He'd outfitted his mother's house on Battery after the war and knew the kind of people she should talk to. And he presented her himself with a couple of pieces that were so startlingly close to those she'd lost she'd wondered whether he could have possibly gotten someone to draw them for him. She was sure she had not described them in anything resembling so much detail. But she could not fathom either why Rhett would go to such ridiculous lengths, or who could help him in such an enterprise in the first place, so she had let the thought drop with a shrug.

The only person unhappy with this arrangement had been Suellen. In characteristic style, she felt she'd been given the crumbs from her sister's table and had complained accordingly. Scarlett would be so horrid and selfish as to send them these old-fashioned things, when she had outfitted her own mansion in Atlanta in the newest of styles. But Scarlett was unmoved. She understood the argument for opulent stylishness all too well, but Tara was different. Luxury at Tara was Tara as it had been and nothing else would do. Besides, Suellen would not dare to turn her gratitude down. Outdated or not, Tara was now without a question the best furnished house in the neighborhood, for everyone else was lucky if they had been able to mend their old furniture.

"The room looks good," Rhett said, turning to look around him. "These are all pieces from the store?"

"Yes. And there is one you found, as well," she said, but the words had somehow lost their shine.

She watched Rhett make his away around the room, his fingers tapping lightly along the polished wood of the stand, the closed lid of the piano, the window sill. She felt like she was seeing the room through his eyes and it somehow seemed empty and vaguely underwhelming, as if the only thing truly alive in it was Solange's portrait and the rest was flat, like wine forgotten in a glass.

Rhett stopped in front of the window, but before he could look outside, his gaze was caught by something in the room. She saw him lift his hand to touch the curtains and then rub them slowly between his fingers. And even before comprehension dawned on her mind, something in that gesture made her squirm uncomfortably. There was something vaguely indecent about it, though she could not tell exactly what it was. Then she realized what he must be remembering and blood rushed swiftly to her face.

"Replaced as well?" Rhett asked, turning to look at her, his hand still on the green velvet. There was unholy amusement lurking in his eyes, and something else besides—something she did not have time to analyze because she was suddenly both embarrassed and obscurely angry at him and his perverse smile. The delicate balance between them had been broken.

"Yes," she said curtly and was saved from his reply by the door opening behind her.

"Here you are!" Suellen's voice floated into the room, the voice of an unlikely savior. "I promised Captain Butler a tour before supper. Don't tell me you've already shown him the parlor, Scarlett!"

"It is, I fear, my fault. I begged to wait downstairs for you, Mrs. Benteen," Rhett said, stepping away from the window. His voice had that tone of exaggerated courtesy that gave the lie to itself and always made Scarlett roll her eyes, but Suellen didn't seem to notice.

"Well, since you're here," she advanced into the room, "perhaps you can help me convince Scarlett that it is a disgrace to leave that poor painting torn up like that!"

Rhett's gaze met Scarlett's, and there was a gleam of wry laughter in his eyes that found a rare, almost unwilling answer in her own.

::o::o::o::

All throughout supper, Suellen delivered a constant stream of news about people in the County. She started with families from Fayetteville and Lovejoy that Scarlett hadn't heard from in years, and made her way quite leisurely to Jonesboro and their immediate neighborhood. It was meant to be a display of the strength and range of her ties, for social activity was the mainstay of Suellen's life and she had come perilously close to losing it after her father's death. In the summer of 1866, there were few people in the County who would welcome the newly minted Suellen Benteen into their parlors. But time, the grind of ever more pressing worries, and the fact that people liked her new husband a great deal had combined to slowly soften collective memory, and Suellen had managed to reestablish herself, now as the mistress of the most prosperous plantation in the neighborhood.

"Scarlett, you will not guess who is teaching school in Jonesboro. 'Randa and Camilla Tarleton! Isn't that a joke? Neither of them has ever been able to spell 'cat'!"

 _As if you could_ , Scarlett thought wryly but held her tongue.

"They live in Jonesboro now and only come to Fairhill at the end of the week. They're boarding with Nancy Wilson. She told me all about it when she was here last month. Poor thing, she's such a sweetheart! You really should take Ella to see her, Scarlett. She told me—in the greatest confidence, of course, and I'll trust you to keep that—that she had not expected to live the day when she would not be able to see her only brother's child."

"Nothing is stopping her from seeing Ella," Scarlett said crisply. "I offered to pay her train ticket both times she wrote me and, as far as I know, she never deigned to reply."

"I can take Ella to see her aunt while we're here," Rhett interjected smoothly. "Or drive Mrs. Wilson from Jonesboro, as the case may be."

He inclined his head towards Suellen who threw him one of her sickly sweet smiles. Scarlett opened her mouth to say more, but refrained at the last moment. Nancy Wilson, née Kennedy, was a mousy old widow who wrote plaintively uncivil letters, not any less irritating for being infrequent. She had never said it openly, but she blamed Scarlett for what had happened to her brother and refused to accept any money from her, even after her own husband had died. Instead she relished in complaining about her straitened circumstances and darkly implied that she was being kept from seeing her niece. As far as Scarlett was concerned, the only reason Suellen could possibly have to cultivate this woman, so long after she'd learned they were not going to be sisters-in-law, was sheer spite.

"Jim Tarleton is raisin' a good crop these days," Will said, chewing slowly. It was the first thing he had offered since joining the table.

"Is he?" Scarlett asked with interest. "How many acres do they manage?"

But Will didn't get to reply, for his wife found the thread of her narrative again.

"Oh yes, Hetty and Betsy help on the plantation these days. It breaks my heart to have to say it, but Hetty is an old maid now, there is no way around it. But Betsy, she married a—gentleman from Lovejoy last year and he moved to Fairhill as well. He and Betsy came to visit last week, because he wanted to get William's advice on their crops. Betsy's been pestering me to go have tea with her at Fairhill for months. She just doesn't understand how much work it is to run a plantation like Tara. Of course, her mother is still alive and her sister is there to help her, so I don't blame her… But I promised her you would go visit while you're here, Scarlett."

"Of course we'll go. I'll take the children as well. I haven't seen the Tarletons in such a long time," Scarlett said, unable to keep a faintly superior smile from her lips.

She knew that playing mistress of Tara was not what was keeping Suellen from visiting Fairhill. The Tarletons all loved Will and the children. The girls and Mr. Tarleton were nice to Suellen as well, but Mrs. Tarleton had never forgiven her for Gerald's death. She had been heard saying she'd rather have Ulysses S. Grant in her parlor than Suellen Benteen, for at least he knew a thing or two about horses. Scarlett had been vaguely annoyed by this obstinacy in the past; but now, after enduring Suellen's artfully artless barbs for hours, she felt she could give Beatrice Tarleton a hug.

"Well, Fairhill is not what it once was," Suellen said airily. "But they are doing better than the Fontaines, at least. Things at Mimosa are _not_ well. With Young Miss dead this June, Sally and young Joe have been living alone with Alex for close to two months now. Would you believe it? A most improper situation and people have already started talking behind their backs... So Alex is going to have to marry Sally!"

"Marry Sally? But he's practically engaged to her sister!" Scarlett exclaimed in surprise. Rhett coughed softly in his napkin.

A small, disagreeable smile crossed Suellen's face at her words.

"I _know_ , isn't that terrible? And she, his brother's widow, too! But he doesn't have the money to marry Dimity Munroe now and Sally's reputation will be in tatters if they continue to live as they do. Sally is absolutely devastated about it as well. Imagine—to have to marry her own sister's beau like that! From what she's told me, she'd rather die than take Alex away from Dimity, but there is little Joe to take into account as well, so she has no choice. And that's nothing compared to what poor little Dimity is going through. She's _completely_ heartbroken and looks like a ghost. You wouldn't recognize her if you saw her in the street."

"Well, it serves Dimity right," Scarlett replied coldly, for she had recovered from her misstep and was none too amused by the trap her sister had managed to lay. "If she had any sense to speak of, she would have made Alex marry her years ago or caught herself another man."

Suellen's eyes narrowed, but before she could say anything, Rhett cleared his throat and asked in a mild drawl, "Is Mimosa far from here, Mrs. Benteen?"

"No, just a little way across the river," she replied, taking her eyes off her sister with some effort.

"If that's the case, perhaps little Joe might like to come over and play with Wade then. How old is the boy now?"

"He is only eight. I am sure he would like to meet Wade. There are so few children around now, nothing like when we were growing up. Susie and Sollie were so happy when they heard their cousins were coming to visit. And especially Bonnie—she's such a lovely child and we'd heard so many great things about her!"

Rhett smile grew a little warmer as it always did when people praised his daughter, but Suellen continued in a dangerously sweet voice. "I had a letter just last month from Aunt Pauline and she couldn't have spoken more highly of Bonnie Blue Butler—or her father," she added with a small nod in Rhett's direction.

Scarlett's hand froze on her knife, a sudden tension in her frame.

"That was most kind of her," Rhett said, taking a swift look at his wife. "I am always humbled by the epistolary diligence of your sex. Our world as we know it would collapse without the admirably industrious pens of our ladies."

But Suellen had a perfectly good weapon in her hands and no amount of drawled praise would make her relinquish it, especially as she herself was a rather poor correspondent.

"I am ashamed to say it, but I haven't even had time to sit down and reply to Aunt Pauline's letter. I swear I am busy from dawn till dusk these days… Have you had a chance to write to Aunt Pauline, Scarlett?" she asked with studied ingenuity. "She said she'd written to you, but hadn't heard back."

"No. No, I haven't," Scarlett said curtly. That letter from Charleston was one of the sorest points from the months of Rhett's absence and she could not—would not deal with the memory of it now, especially not in front of him.

"She was so concerned about you," Suellen carried on, studiously heedless to her sister's warning tone. "She was worried you might be overtaxing yourself in Atlanta, Scarlett. What, with the store and the mills… God knows it's work enough for two men!"

And with that the wound opened and black, poisonous blood spread through Scarlett's veins in a rush. Her knife and fork hit the edge of the plate with a clang. Beneath the hot, swift rage Suellen had unleashed and was about to incur flowed a deeper, more suffocating anger towards the man who had made a fool of her, in Charleston like in Atlanta, while she had been waiting at home for him. That anger could not find its target now, for released it would wipe out everything in its path. The ungrateful ninny in front of her would bear the brunt of it. But Suellen too was saved.

"Sue—" Will started in warning, but his voice was covered by Rhett's, speaking at the same time.

"Have you ever been to Charleston, Mrs. Benteen?" he asked affably. There had been a look of sudden, grim comprehension on his face at his sister-in-law's words, but it was gone now and his voice was light and interested.

Suellen smiled pleasantly at him, for she sensed she had ventured a little too far on thin ice and was glad for the escape. She had wanted to sting her sister for her comments about Dimity—and Aunt Pauline's letter with its dark complaints against Scarlett coming from Captain Butler himself served quite well for that purpose. But she had not expected Scarlett's eyes to flash so downright murderously in reply and instinct told her it was time to retreat.

"I have—before the war, of course," she said with a soft sigh. "There was no chance to visit after that. I always promise myself I will go, but never find the time in the end. I do so want to see Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie again. I haven't seen them in ages. They wanted me to come this fall—but we always have such a horrendously busy time at Tara in the fall..."

"Perhaps in winter or spring then?" Rhett said pleasantly. "Charleston is at its most beautiful in springtime. There are few places on earth that come close to its beauty when its flower gardens are in bloom, if my biased opinion may be allowed to stand on the matter. And you might find its mild winters to your liking as well."

"Oh, that sounds quite lovely," Suellen said, almost wistfully. "I can't possibly travel right now, not for another year, but perhaps after that…"

She turned quite red as she spoke the words and Scarlett, who had been watching her with burning eyes, waiting for an opportunity to avenge herself, sat back in her chair with a start. _Dear God, she is pregnant again_ , she realized and there was something like a queer, brief pain in her chest, sharper than the anger it had replaced. She pushed her food around on her plate listlessly, a sudden taste of ashes in her mouth. She didn't feel like fighting anymore. Rhett, too, had closed his eyes briefly at Suellen's words and, though he nodded politely, his appetite for conversation seemed to have vanished. In the end, Suellen's most lethal attack had been the one she had not even realized she was waging.

"I can take Wade to Mimosa," Will said in the sudden silence that followed. "I'm headed over there tomorrow to help Alex with a barn he's buildin'."

::o::o::o::

When supper was finally over, Scarlett was exhausted, all the energy her afternoon nap had instilled in her gone without a trace. The children had had supper in the nursery and she had wanted to see them before retiring for the night, but found she had no strength left. Rhett and Will went to smoke on the back porch, a restless Bonnie retrieved from her room to sit on her father's knee; Suellen disappeared into the kitchen to give instructions for the next day; and Scarlett made her way straight to her bed.

As her head touched the pillow, the events of the last hours played themselves in her tired mind. Suellen and her baby. Dimity Munroe and Alex. Rhett's hand on the green velvet curtains. The thoughts swirled round and round until they finally melted into a fitful oblivion. She slept then and dreamed that she had had her baby. Someone had handed him to her—a sweet, familiar weight she had never fully appreciated before—and she closed her arms around him so that he would not melt away. She woke up with a start to find the bundle in her arms wriggling under the covers. Her mind took a second to adjust to the waking world and recognize the familiar profile in the moonlight.

"Ella, what are you doing here?"

"Susie was mean to me and I don't want to sleep in her room anymore," Ella whispered. "Can I sleep here, Mommy?"

Scarlett hesitated for a second, vaguely aware of the irony in Ella being here, while Bonnie was not in Rhett's room. Would he smirk at her in that superior way tomorrow? But she was too tired to do anything but yawn softly and say, "All right. But just for tonight. We'll take care of Susie tomorrow."

And with her arm around Ella, she fell back into a deep, dreamless sleep.

* * *

 _ETA: Scarlett's not alone in thinking Frank's sister is a pain in the ass. I completely blanked out on the fact that she had a husband and so I've had to patch it up and kill him. Thanks, LMS, for catching that!_


	8. When We Were Orphans

_I should start by saying that I'm sorry for the delay in posting this. I'm afraid updates are only going to get less and less regular as we move into this charming new season - and probably less and less frequent, too. But don't worry, I won't disappear for five years again and I won't let this story go unfinished either._

 _Now, Scarlett needed some time to rest and we all needed some time with Wade, since he's in the title and all. So this chapter provides both. But first I want to thank you all for your reviews for the last chapter and thank iso for her expert beta-ing. And, according to the terms of my new Delurker Fidelization Program, this chapter is for India Wilkes who made me blush._

* * *

 **Chapter VIII: When We Were Orphans**

 _"'A boy has to be proud of his father_ — _or stepfather. I can't let him be ashamed before the other little brutes. Cruel creatures, children.'" (GWTW Ch. LII)_

* * *

The first days at Tara passed by like in a pleasant dream. Scarlett could not remember any visit home after the war being so undisturbed, so strangely calm and peaceful. She had not expected this one to be either, not after that poisonous first evening. Yet somehow, miraculously, it was.

Suellen had reigned in her spitefulness for some reason and only addressed her neutrally, when at all. In truth, she did not see much of Suellen outside of meals during those first few days, which suited her quite well. Neither did she see much of Will. He rode his wagon to Mimosa every morning after his chores were done, to help Alex with the barn. And so, instead of discussing the state of the plantation with Will or bickering with her sister, Scarlett found herself the undisturbed mistress of her time in a way she hadn't been in ages—for in Atlanta there was always something for her to do.

But now suddenly there wasn't, and she spent her time walking slowly around the grounds, admiring the fruit of Will's steady labor—and her own. Everything was both tidy and plentiful around the house: the neat rows of the vegetable garden, the whitewashed coops and stables, the sweet, heavy promise of the apples and peaches on the branches of trees in the orchard. And beyond it in the distance stretched rows and rows of cotton as far as her eyes could see. A couple of times in the evenings, she ventured along old, thickly-shaded trails at the edge of the forest and watched the melting of the red into blue as night descended gently on the lands.

But most of all she slept. She slept more than she could remember doing at any time before in her life, her recent convalescence excepted. But this was not the torpor that came over her in Atlanta to leave her body leaden and her mind like soggy wool. This was a soothing rest, tempting like the cool, clear waters of a pool; a rest she never wanted to leave. Sometimes, when she woke up in the mornings—the sun streaming brightly through her curtains, the mockers waging chirpy war in the magnolia outside her window—she drowsily thought she was a young girl again, living in the enchanted reign of Ellen. It had happened before when she was at Tara, yet reality always swiftly intruded to dispel that illusion and call her back to the present. But now the dream could have lingered in the waking world for hours, for no matter where she turned, it was as if a thoughtful hand had been there first to remove all disturbance from her path and ensure her peace.

She saw little of her husband and children those first few days. Rhett had established himself the firm favorite of the nursery set and spent almost all of his time outside with his two daughters and Sollie; Susie having haughtily chosen her dolls over such activities and Ella having reluctantly chosen the outdoors over her cousin's company. Scarlett had only a hazy idea how they spent their time. She heard them sometimes in the evenings, chasing sleepy ducklings and chickens as they retreated to their coops, so Bonnie could kiss them and say good night. She saw Rhett a couple of times in the afternoon carrying a sleeping Bonnie to her room, while Sollie and Ella made their way to the nursery, yawning mightily. And one morning she smiled and waved at them from her window as they were leaving for a walk in the forest. They waved back, three small figures shaking their hands rapidly like cheerful mockingbirds and Rhett lifting a lazy hand in greeting. He'd lost that slightly drawn look he wore in Atlanta. His shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, he looked tanned and swarthy and younger somehow. They hadn't talked alone once after that first evening in the parlor.

The other person she had not talked much to was Wade. He followed Will around like a shadow and was rarely away from his side. Any day now he'll put a straw in the corner of his mouth and the resemblance will be complete, Scarlett thought amusedly, as she watched her son's face get more and more sunburned and his tidy coveralls more and more faded. He went to Mimosa every day and had, by all appearances, made fast friends with little Joe Fontaine. When work on the barn progressed beyond the reach of Will, with his wooden leg, and they stopped going to Mimosa, Wade accompanied his uncle on all of his chores at Tara and was never seen around the house. But he had lost his sullenness and Scarlett was relieved that the whole pesky matter was behind them now, no further intervention from her needed. She put the issue out of her mind entirely as she floated on the almost weightless charm of those mid-August days.

The first disturbance to her peace came almost a week after they had arrived at Tara. She had decided it was time to go through the plantation's ledgers, for Will had promised he would take her to see the fields the day after tomorrow. She made her way to the office with pleasure and hummed softly as she sat down at the tall secretary bursting with papers from its every pigeonhole. This shabby, comfortable room that had been Ellen's always put her in a good mood, as did the prospect of spending a couple of hours going over tidy rows of figures. But before she could get started on the ledgers, a folded paper by the inkstand caught her eye. She picked it up without hesitation and scanned its contents quickly, a small frown insinuating itself between her eyebrows as she did so. "Dear Aunt," it said, "It was with the greatest pleasure that I recieved your letter. I am sorry for taking so—" and there it stopped, tantalizingly close to an apology. It was dated two weeks before their arrival at Tara.

In just a second her decision was made. Her mouth set in a determined line, Scarlett pushed the ledgers aside and got up to lock the door. She returned to the secretary and cast her eye over its compartments. The ones at the very top had not been disturbed in years, she knew their familiar disarray. She reached for the papers in one of the lower pigeonholes. Bills, all of them. The one next to it held telegrams. Rhett's telegrams to Will from the last weeks were on top and she skimmed those quickly, but there was little of interest in them. "Letter to follow by courier," one of them said, but the letter was not there.

Finally, in a small drawer to her left, she found a pile of letters. The one on top was from Rhett, but it was addressed to her sister, not Will. She read it with raised eyebrows, rising even further at the amount of flattery the short lines conveyed. Hospitality, gratitude, Southern ladies… No wonder he had Suellen eating out of his hand these days! She read on to see what he had to say about sleeping arrangements, but the matter was broached only in tactfully vague and un-illuminating reference to things he had already written to Will.

Surprisingly, the next letter was from Dimity Munroe in Fayetteville. "…is Alex happy? Have you seen him at all? I have gone back on this letter so many times already. You were kindness itself to encourage me to write to you, but I wanted so badly to be strong. I wanted to burn these lines or blot them out, but I found that I could not. I cannot change my mind, for it is not my mind speaking. It is my heart and that I cannot change or blot out just yet." Scarlett rolled her eyes. What a singularly silly idea, to send such a thing to Suellen of all people! No wonder the chit hadn't caught Alex, if this was all she could come up with for a plan. And to think Alex had probably been in love with her for years…

Shaking her head, she reached for the next letter. One look at it and she knew it was the one she had been after. She braced herself for anger. "Given this most distressing state of affairs, Eulalie and I must urge you to intervene by your sister, Susan, since your dear mother is no longer here to guide the two of you. It would break her heart to know that—" Scarlett folded the letter with chilly, precise motions. If only she had had the good sense to pack Suellen off to Charleston after the war and let her, Pauline and Eulalie survive on water, gossip and good manners! It would have served them well.

She flipped quickly through the remaining letters, rapidly losing interest in Suellen's correspondence, when a yellowed letter towards the very bottom of the pile caught her eye. "To Marie-Manon," its front said, "in care of Mrs. Ellen Robillard O'Hara." She smoothed it out with a small frown. There was a second page folded within, a different type of script on it. She started reading the first page and, halfway through the lines, drew a sharp breath. She checked the date quickly. October 1866. There were only two other letters left in the drawer. They both had the same handwriting on them and they were both unopened. One of them had the same address as the first. The other said "To Mrs. Ellen Robillard O'Hara, the O'Hara family or any descendants thereof."

She opened them after only a brief hesitation, read them—and sat back in her chair, her hand over her mouth.

::o::o::o::

The sun filtered lazily through the trees and the air was ripe with the sleepy humming of bees. It was the early afternoon, the day after she'd read the letters. Though tired, Scarlett didn't feel like retiring to her room just yet. She sat on the front porch in a rocking chair, a long, green shawl draped over its back, almost grazing the floor with every gentle swing. Mammy had brought her the shawl, in case she felt like taking an unadvised walk in the sun. She'd also brought her a sun hat, for the same reason, and a pitcher of fresh lemonade, both now deposited on a small iron table by her side. Scarlett had looked at her from the corner of her eye, murmured in thanks, and sunk back in her reverie. She was on the point of losing her battle with sleep, her eyes roaming dreamily over the tapestry of green in front of her, when her peace was suddenly disturbed.

Ella bounded up the stairs of the porch, in uncharacteristic haste. She was hatless and had two turkey feathers in her hair, secured with a little hair comb. One of the feathers had broken and drooped rather sadly by her ear, and her whole face was red from exertion.

"Ella," Scarlett said lazily, "no running."

"We're playing hide-and-seek," Ella panted, waving her arms around like a frantic sparrow. "Oh, oh, where can I hide?"

"In the house?" Scarlett gently pointed the obvious.

"No! Those are the rules! Uncle Rhett said we can't hide in the house or go outside the yard, or we lose."

"Well then," her mother shrugged, but before she had time to encourage Ella to go away, the girl squeaked, "They're coming!" and jumped behind the rocking chair, pulling the great trailing shawl over her thin frame.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake!" Scarlett muttered and was then treated to the next act of the play.

The noise that had sent Ella diving for cover had not come from the seeker, but from Sollie and Bonnie, who were themselves in search of a place to hide. They too wore turkey feathers in their curls, but theirs was the kind of tall, lustrous plumage a bird might fight to keep—and a lady to put in her bonnet. They also had diagonal lines of indigo blue on their cheeks, which went a long way towards explaining the headdress. A game of Indian must have taken place before the current hide-and-seek. As she caught full sight of her daughter, Scarlett sighed in dismay. Her frock was streaked with dust and rather sadly torn. It was a new one of blue taffeta, too. If only Rhett could be made to see reason on this.

The two girls seemed to have reached an impasse in front of the porch.

"You can't hide here," Sollie said impatiently.

"Yes, I can!" Bonnie shot back, wearing a frown that was so thunderously O'Hara her mother was coaxed out of her annoyance and almost started to laugh.

"No, you can't hide where I hide! You have to find your own place. That was my place over there and you—"

"Rhett will find you both in a heartbeat if you don't stop," Scarlett offered helpfully from above.

At the sound of her voice, Bonnie and Sollie stopped arrested. They looked up at her, then at each other, then scrambled for the jessamine bushes in unison, having heard the call of "ready or not" in the distance. But to their misfortune—and all barnyard's poultry revenge—vanity was to have its costs. Two sets of magnificent feathers stuck out at the top of the bushes like the ears of an unfortunate rabbit.

The hunters were not far away either. Moments after the girls had ducked for cover, Rhett came lithely up the path. He had feathers in his hat as well, though his seemed to have come from a rooster, the turkey having presumably rebelled against the spoilage. He touched two fingers to the brim of his hat when he saw Scarlett. She was sure his sharp eyes had also seen Ella behind her, but he didn't say anything. He was not alone either, she realized with some surprise. Bringing up the rear was little Joe Fontaine, his swarthy little face and burning black eyes immediately proclaiming his identity. He had rooster feathers in his hat as well and walked by her husband's side in something that was clear imitation of Rhett's savagely elegant gait, but that suited him quite well, for the Fontaines had always been nimble on their tiny, aristocratic feet. That's what a son of Rhett would look like, she thought suddenly and shook her head minutely to dispel the notion.

They moved across the lawn together, man and boy, and then little Joe turned towards the house and his eyes narrowed in triumph.

"Found 'em!" he yelled.

The ears of the unlucky rabbit twitched in arrested shock and then reluctantly crawled away from each other. Sollie and Bonnie emerged from the bushes, throwing twin mutinous gazes at the world. "Told you so," Sollie muttered under her breath to her cousin, her pigtails twitching with self-righteous indignation. What followed was a bout of squabbling of the kind only Rhett had the patience to settle, which he usually did by bribery. But this time he neatly sidestepped his duties. He came up to the porch instead and propped one foot on its upper step, his hat balancing negligently on his bended knee. Scarlett looked at him with questioning eyes.

"Now, where could little Ella be?" he asked in a carefully dramatic voice. "We could find no trace of her. Have you seen her, Scarlett?"

Something in that casual use of her name startled Scarlett. She missed her cue entirely and he winked at her to secure her answer.

"No," she croaked and then cleared her throat. "No, I haven't."

"That's a pity then, seeing how she won this game."

"I won?" a tiny, incredulous voice came from behind the rocking chair.

"Indeed," Rhett said with a grin. "You were the last to be found."

Ella erupted from under the shawl in a heartbeat. Not particularly used to winning anything, she cried her victory breathlessly, jumping up and down on the porch and hugging Scarlett's side impulsively. "I won! I won, Mommy! Daddy, I won!"

She had taken to calling Rhett "Daddy" that spring, but the habit, like so many other things, had been disrupted by his leaving Atlanta, and on his return he'd found himself demoted back to "Uncle Rhett." Scarlett, on the other hand, had been—unwittingly and quite unwillingly on her part—promoted from "Mother" to "Mommy," a result of her trying to spend time with Ella during Rhett's absence.

"Yes, sweetheart," Rhett said, a strange expression on his face. "Let's get the girls and Joe and we'll get Mammy to bring us some cake. The winner gets two slices."

But he turned to find that only Bonnie was left on the lawn. Will's wagon had entered the driveway and Sollie had made her way straight to it, abandoning the dispute with her cousin. She liked to sit on the front seat, next to her father, for the short distance to the stables. Joe followed as well, for he had come to Tara that morning to play with Wade, who was in the wagon as well. He waved to his friend, but Wade took just one look at the scene in front of him, lingering for a moment on the feathers in Joe's hat, and turned his head away. When Will stopped the wagon and dismounted to get his daughter, Wade silently got down as well and cut across the pastures to the stable and barns. Joe's eyebrows rushed into a scowl, but he followed the wagon on the longer way to the stables.

That left Bonnie, who retreated to the porch, pulling with some vexation at her torn dress to get it to stay properly in place. Scarlett couldn't decide if to be amused or irritated at the sight, but beneath both feelings there was a slight, discomfiting twinge of regret that Rhett and the girls would be going inside now and this moment would be over. Rhett put his hat back on his head in preparation for picking up his daughter, and Scarlett spoke unthinkingly and rather more testily than she had intended.

"Oh, Rhett, do take those feathers out of your hat. You look like a fool."

"No," said Bonnie, encircling her father's leg as if she could defend him against this unwarranted attack. But Rhett laughed, white teeth gleaming under his mustache.

"You're just jealous of my plumage, aren't you? Here." With deft fingers, he plucked a long, black feather from his hat and stuck it at the top of her chignon. He drew back to look at her, tilting his head speculatively, while Ella and Bonnie tittered behind their hands. Scarlett almost felt like laughing herself at his impudence. She did smile, but only after Rhett and the girls had gone into the house. She took the feather out of her hair then and examined it absently, running a finger softly along its length. Green reflexes danced across the glossy black surface where she touched it.

::o::o::o::

Wade let the straw drop from his hand with a sigh. He'd been trying to entice the little brown calf to come to the stall door and be petted, but the animal turned an indifferent hide to him and his offerings. He'd been half-expecting it, but it still stung. He felt almost desperately unhappy and alone, and the self-pity he had been trying to contain for days swept over him in a helpless wave, drowning even the anger he'd felt earlier when he saw his stepfather and Joe Fontaine with matching feathers in their hats.

This was not what he'd imagined coming to Tara would be like—though, in truth, he had not spent much time thinking of what he'd actually do at the plantation once he was there. He'd just thought he and his mother (and Ella, too) could leave Atlanta like they had during the war. And then they'd be at Tara and they'd be fine again, all their troubles left behind. They didn't even have to return to Atlanta. They could live here like they had when he was little and perhaps they could convince Aunt Melly and Beau to come live with them as well. He and Beau wouldn't even need to go to school. Aunt Melly could teach them everything they needed to know from her books. It was the perfect plan, except for one thing: Rhett had come as well.

There was no use now in trying to convince his mother to stay here, no use in coming up with a plan to bring his cousin and aunt to Tara. They might have just as well stayed at home. And in some ways it would have been better to stay at home. It wasn't that he didn't like Tara. It was just that he felt a little out of place here, as if everyone else was happily in the midst of things and he was always on the outside looking in. He didn't understand the rough-voiced men who had been building the barn at Mimosa with his Uncle Will; and the little he did understand discomfited him. He couldn't hand them their tools quickly when they shouted out for them, like Joe Fontaine could, and he was always slow and somewhat clumsy at whatever chores he was given.

A perceptive adult might have told him it was the legacy of his father's blood winning over his mother's, for the Hamilton-Wilkes clan could turn out country gentlemen on occasion, but never country people. But perceptive adults were scarce in Wade's life at the moment. There was just one of them really, Uncle Will, and Will didn't see much use in bringing up realities that couldn't be changed. He just found the boy tasks that made him feel less clumsy and patted his shoulder silently from time to time. And in its own way it worked, for Wade felt safer at Will's side these days than he did anywhere else.

That terrible night of his stepfather's confession had left something in his chest, something like a hard little ball of anger and malice—and the rest of his being was soft and easily bruised by it. It ripped through his more delicate feelings every day, like it had done already through his friendship with his cousin. He had been cold and distant with Beau after that night and he hardly knew himself why that was. He only knew that the ball was shifting in his chest without relief and, if he talked about it even once, it would move suddenly and tear him to shreds. But there was something in Will's calm eyes and toneless voice that halted the damage and kept the ball from moving. Will somehow understood everything without words and it was a comfort to be by his side.

But despite this, he was fiercely unhappy at times. He missed his Aunt Melly and he missed Beau. Oh, how he missed Beau! He missed the way his cousin always understood what he was talking about and always wanted to play the same games he did. Even before Joe Fontaine had proved himself a turncoat, he had been nothing like Beau at all. He kept talking about things and places Wade didn't know and showed little interest in the things and places Wade did know. And he was bad-tempered and unpredictable, too, like a wild little beast only half-tamed. He took offense at the strangest things and was always ready to fight, even without a reason. "Let's fight," he'd say and, before you knew it, his fist had landed on your ribs hard enough to leave a bruise. Wade was not entirely sure he liked Joe, really.

The door of the barn opened and light came in like a rush of dusty gold.

"Wade, you in here?" Joe's voice came from the doorway.

Wade didn't reply, but the boy entered the barn anyway and caught sight of him by the stalls in the back.

"What you doing in there?"

Wade shrugged, pushing his fingernail against the rusty hinge of the stall door. He hoped his shrug conveyed cold indifference to both the question and the person asking it. But if it did, Joe didn't seem to notice it, for he pressed on in a slightly impatient voice.

"You should come out now. We was playing hide-and-seek—and Indian before that."

"I don't want to play with—with _them_ ," Wade said coldly, the ball shifting angrily in his chest. "And you shouldn't have, either."

"And why not?" Joe shot back in that combative, distinctly un-Beau-like manner he had.

Wade hesitated for a moment. "Because—because Rhett is a bad man and—and a coward."

It felt good to say it aloud, to move with his anger and not against it. Like from another life came the echo of things Joe Whiting and Frankie Bonnell had said about his stepfather and he was prepared to offer those in justification as well, for there was no way he could tell Joe Fontaine the whole truth. But there was no need for that. Little Joe had a lot of faults, but mistrusting his friends was not among them.

"Is he?" he said with a sudden scowl, stuffing his feathered hat under his arm, out of sight. "Does he need shootin'?" he asked in a serious tone. He'd heard his Uncle Alex say those very words in that very same voice before, and he'd been waiting for the occasion to use them himself.

"Does he need what?" Wade frowned, not sure he'd heard correctly.

"Shootin'. I can bring my gun."

Wade's eyes widened in horror. "No, no shooting," he said quickly.

"I only ever shot possum with it, so perhaps it wouldn't have been good anyway," little Joe said pensively. "But maybe we can get Uncle Alex's pistols," he brightened up again,"—or the rifle."

"No need for that," Wade said with some alarm, then caught himself and added in a more jaded tone, "I mean, my mother wouldn't like it if you—if we shot him, that is."

Joe nodded gravely, for his own mother had strange ideas like that. It was large part of the reason why his expertise on the matter was a little more theoretical than he would have liked to admit, not that the wide-eyed boy in front of him would have been able to tell.

"Can you shoot a gun?" he asked, eyeing Wade speculatively.

Wade shook his head reluctantly. He'd never felt strongly about guns before this moment, for his Aunt Melly hated them. Rhett had said he would teach him how to shoot like a gentleman and take him hunting in Virginia when he was older. But that was useless to him now, like everything Rhett had ever said. Still, it was pretty dispiriting to find he had fallen short again in this strange, rough world. He wondered whether he should mention his grandfather's sword, but decided against it. He and Beau had talked about it once and concluded that it took a lot more courage to use a sword than a gun, but somehow he felt Joe would be less than impressed by that theory.

"That's alright," Joe said charitably. "We'll go to Abel and he'll teach you."

"Who?"

"Abel Wynder. He lives just across the swamp, close to my house. He's the best sharpshooter in the whole County. Can shoot a squirrel dead in the eye at seventy-five yards."

Wade was impressed. Seventy-five yards… Not even Rhett could drill a dime at that distance.

"Do you think he'll teach me?" he asked, trying to keep eagerness from creeping into his voice.

"Sure," Joe said, then continued more guardedly, "If I ask him, that is. He taught me how to shoot. He was in the Troop with my father. My father saved his life once."

And that was the other thing about Joe. He always talked about his father and his many heroic deeds. He could recite the details of those battles from memory. It made Wade uncomfortable, for while he had a clear and absolute belief that his own father was a hero, he had no comparable examples to offer. He had been tempted to lie about it once when Joe asked, but the betrayal seemed too great, especially as the first battle that came to his mind was the battle of Franklin.

"So Abel taught me how to use a gun, 'cause he says every boy needs to be the best shoot he can be, no matter what else he does when he's grown up. What you gonna be when you grow up?"

"A lawyer," Wade said quickly from the force of long habit.

Joe nodded, though he had only a very foggy idea of what a lawyer was. He thought it had something to do with living in Jonesboro.

"Well, I'm gonna be a soldier and be a hero like my father. Or go to Texas like my Uncle Tony and be an outlaw."

Wade had never heard anyone say they wanted to be an outlaw before, but hero was his second career choice and he regretted bitterly not having offered it first.

"We'll go to Abel tomorrow," Joe said with determination and started to pluck the rooster feathers out of his hat.

Wade took a deep breath, nodded, and realized with some surprise that he felt better.


	9. Mimosa

_Last week I had set out to work on an update to that other story I (infrequently) write, but inspiration is fickle and this is what I ended up working on instead. The usual thanks for the people who reviewed the last installment. I haven't felt very productive writing-wise_ _lately and have probably hit a bit of a burnout_ _, but your kind words did help a little. More thanks than usual for iso who put up with a truly appalling amount of whining from me._

 _Disclaimer: I own even less than usual, because I borrowed some words from MM and an idea from Ripley._

* * *

 **Chapter IX: Mimosa**

 _"'… anything you want for Wade or Ella. And if Will Benteen can't make a go of the cotton, I'm willing to chip in and help out on that white elephant in Clayton County that you love so much. That's fair enough, isn't it?'" (GWTW Ch. XLVIII)_

* * *

The next day Scarlett and Will went out to see the fields. Wade had asked to be taken to Mimosa in the morning, so he came with them as well.

"And how do you like little Joe, Wade?" Scarlett asked with a smile before they got into the wagon.

"He's all right, I guess," her son mumbled, not quite meeting her eyes.

Her smile grew wider at what she took to be his understatement and she reached out to brush the unruly brown curls from his forehead. Wade looked up with a little grin of his own before he scampered into the back of the wagon.

She was in good spirits when they reached Mimosa. The day was bright and crackling already with the kind of dry heat that was the best weather in the world for cotton. The fields they had passed by on their way, on both sides of the river, were cultivated and prosperous and Scarlett's heart rose at the sight of them. This looked like the best crop they had had in years. One could almost hear the cotton grow on the vast sea of green. It bode well for the rest of her day with Will.

She would never get used to seeing Mimosa as it was now, bereft of the wooden wing that had burned down during the war. But the main house gleamed reassuringly yellow from among the pink-tasseled trees that had given it its name, and the grounds looked well-tended and busy. There were already a couple of wagons in the driveway, for these were the last days of work on the barn and men had come early to start on the roof. She could hear their rough, easy laughter rising on the clear morning air in the distance and felt like laughing herself at it. What a good day this was going to be!

As Will stopped the wagon and Wade quickly climbed down, Sally Fontaine came out from the house to greet them. It had been a long time since Scarlett had last seen Sally and the change in her was noticeable. She was a year older than Scarlett herself, but while Grandma Fontaine and Young Miss were alive and ruling the house, there had been something of the girl still left in her despite everything she had lived through. She was a woman now and she looked grave; there was no other word to describe her. She had always been pretty in a dark-haired sort of way, but there was something deeply reserved in her delicate features now, something vaguely hinting of sadness in the way houses with all their windows shuttered do, without expressing it fully.

"Scarlett, so good to see you," she said and her smile seemed genuine, if a little tired. "Won't you come in?"

"Oh, I wish we could! But Will's taking me to see the fields today. We must press on before the heat sets in. Do come see us at Tara, Sally! I haven't seen you in so long."

Sally nodded lightly, but before she could make any further reply, Alex came up from behind the house, brushing sawdust off his clothes. He had changed as well. It wasn't just the transformation of laughing, brawling dandy into bitter farmer, for that Scarlett had had ample chance to notice in him and Tony before. It was that he seemed to have lost that devilish Fontaine gaiety that had always sharpened the edge of his bitterness. Without it, it sat blunt and unwavering on his face. He had the look of a man who knew he would not get what he wanted, but who had made peace with that fact and had fashioned himself a sort of bleak authority from it.

"Scarlett, good to see you," he said, lifting his faded hat off his head.

The smile didn't reach his eyes and neither did much else during their brief conversation. He and Sally looked a little stiff and stilted, standing there side by side, the pink fluff of the mimosa trees, now past its bloom, swirling slowly around their heads and falling on their shoulders. Sally's eyes had grown even more shuttered with his presence and it was only when little Joe came running to the front of the house that a small light flickered in them. She tousled his hair briefly while he greeted the newcomers, and then he and Wade took their leave and disappeared into the back yard. A sudden gust of wind swept through the mimosa trees and their long, heavy pods, the first fruits of the season to come, clanged discontentedly together. They were green now, but they would soon turn reddish, and then brown.

"Will, why doesn't Alex marry Dimity?" Scarlett asked when they had finally left the house behind. "Sally doesn't want to marry him any more than he wants to marry her and I'm sure Dimity doesn't mind the fact that he's poor. After all, the Munroes are doing much worse than the Fontaines now. Is it really because of the gossip about him and Sally?"

"No, it ain't just that," Will replied quietly. "I figure it's little Joe that's keeping him more than anything."

"Little Joe? But—"

"If Alex married Dimity tomorrow, they'd be happy for the time bein'—and Sally would too, in her own way. There's plenty at Mimosa for them all to live on. But is that goin' to be the case a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now? Maybe, but then again maybe not. Alex wants to do right by Sally, but most of all he wants to do right by his brother's child. Make sure he has the money for an education or make sure he at least has Mimosa when he grows up, cause that's all the Fontaines have left in the world. He might not be able to do that if he has his own family to look after."

"Oh, but surely Dimity wouldn't stand in the way of that!"

"Not now, no. But if there ain't no money, and she and Alex have children of their own, what kind of life are they goin' to have? Will they afford to feed them, send them to school, leave them somethin' when they die? And where is that goin' to leave little Joe and Sally?"

"Well, Sally could always find someone else to marry."

"Even if she could and wanted to, that would mean takin' little Joe away from Mimosa and I don't think Alex wants that. Marryin' Sally is the best solution to all of that he could find."

Scarlett nodded silently, a little depressed by this logic despite herself. It _was_ the best solution, if one set aside all matters of the heart. And who could afford not to set them aside in times like these? Sally was already in a difficult position, being a widow with a child and now in danger of having a tainted reputation for having lived alone with a man for so long. She would most likely have to live off Alex's charity for ever, as would her son. Marrying Alex would just make things a little easier for her and ensure that, no matter what happened, little Joe would always have Mimosa. And Dimity could find herself another husband, after all.

"Still, Alex wanted to marry Dimity this spring," Will said. "He had a mind to buy a cotton mill that's up for sale in Jonesboro, but he couldn't get no one to lend him the cash, cause everyone knows cotton's goin' to sell cheap this fall."

"A cotton mill? Alex Fontaine? What did he want with a cotton mill?"

"To make money, of course. There's more money now in ownin' a mill or a textile factory and workin' on other people's cotton than there is in growin' your own. Especially with them railroads they're layin' all over the place. I'd say he was set to make good money and then he could've married Dimity in good conscience. But he couldn't find no cash and then Young Miss died and it was too late to do somethin' about it. So I figure he just gave up on the idea. It's the women who haven't. Sally pleaded and pleaded for him to marry her sister, but he ain't budgin'. Can't say I'm blamin' him either. "

Scarlett digested the information in silence. Her mind had lost interest in the sentimental problems of her neighbors once it saw that they were intractable, but the idea of Alex Fontaine as a businessman was more than a little startling and she didn't quite know what to make of it. It spoke of something a little unpleasant in the life in the County, something that was already becoming visible around her as well. They were now taking a detour around the Fontaine property to reach their fields and she could see the same spectacle here that had greeted her on the way from Jonesboro—the weeds and broomsedge stretching victorious over abandoned acres, the forest staking its claim on land that had used to be its own. Mimosa was a thin sliver of its former self, and so, she would come to realize, was Tara.

Aided by her money, Will was now close to farming a hundred acres, if one counted the food and feed crops as well. But that was a small fraction of Tara's acreage and the rest was growing wild again. As the wagon swayed slowly on the long red road that embraced her property, she saw what she had not seen from the house. Will's tenacity and that of his paid workers had kept seedling pines and blackberry brambles from crawling over Tara's grounds and smothering its precious swath of cultivated land, but they were powerless from keeping all of its broad acres intact. The ones that lay fallow at its margins were inexorably turning back into forest, as were most of its neighboring properties.

"No, I ain't blamin' him one bit. This section won't come back for fifty years—if it ever comes back," Will said slowly, chewing on a straw. "Tara's the best farm in the County, thanks to you and me, Scarlett, but it's a farm, a two-mule farm, not a plantation. And the Fontaine place, it comes next to Tara and then the Tarletons. They ain't makin' much money but they're gettin' along and they got gumption. But most of the rest of the folks, the rest of the farms—"

He didn't need to say more, because the picture was clear. It would become even clearer over the next hour and Scarlett's heart sunk, as if the last days had been a sweet, lying dream that couldn't last and now she was finally awake. There was no reason to be disappointed, she told herself. She had been home before and knew how things were in the County. She had read the ledgers and knew exactly how much of Tara was being farmed. But the ledgers only showed the positive and fruitful, the steady growth over the years, the acres standing between them and nothingness, whereas this wasteland they were traveling through showed the negative, the loss and distance from the past. She knew, moreover, that there was nothing she could do as long as Will ran Tara and he stubbornly resisted any expansion of their current financial arrangement.

She had been pleased at first when Will had said he wanted to manage on his own after he married Suellen. It had been a welcome respite to her at the time and she had respected him for it, even if she didn't always agree with his decisions. In fact, his very first decision as Suellen's husband had been to squander precious money from that year's crop by paying half of Carreen's dowry at the convent in Charleston, and Scarlett, who had not been aware that brides of Christ needed dowries to begin with, had fumed when she'd heard of it. What a mad world this was, if one needed money to live in it and money to renounce it as well! But she had grudgingly paid the other half, partially because Will had calmly said that he and Suellen were paying because Carreen had been generous in signing her share of Tara to her sisters.

In different circumstances, he might have recouped that loss, but 1867 saw the birth of his daughter in May and a marked decrease in the price of cotton in September. Scarlett had offered to help, but was gently refused. She was secretly relieved by it as well, for she had planned to use the money to expand and consolidate her businesses in Atlanta. She would flutter her eyelashes and cajole Rhett into giving her money for Tara once they were married, she decided. But in the end no feminine wiles were needed, for her new husband, if vexing in many other ways and infuriatingly immune to her fluttering eyelashes to begin with, had proved wonderfully generous as regarded Tara. She had written to Will in triumph, fully expecting him to accept the money she was now free to dispense at leisure—but was, once again, politely turned down. Confused and incensed by his letter, she had complained about it to Rhett in their bridal suite at the National.

"Oh, why does he have to be so contrary? Suellen made it clear that they are barely scraping by, and now with another baby on its way as well… God's nightgown, he ought to be grateful that I offered!"

Rhett, who was lounging in his armchair with a cigar, had looked at her through a cloud of smoke with a cryptic half-smile.

"It is a rare man, my dear, who is happy to live off a woman's charity."

"Oh, it is not charity! It's an investment, really."

"Every age has the philanthropists it deserves," he shrugged.

But despite his elusive smirk and his taunts, he had offered sound advice. It was the children who would succeed where she had failed, he said. Not only Will's daughters, though Sollie's birth in September helped a little, but Wade and Ella as well. This was no longer a matter of sheer survival and nothing else. It was a matter of ensuring that the Benteen children had a future and that her own children were left a legacy, like the one Gerald had left for her. Especially since, as Rhett had pointed out, they might not always be happy to be supported by their stepfather. For that Tara had to be endure through the years and be prosperous.

It was this case she had pleaded with Will the next time she visited Tara and, a couple of months after Sollie's birth, he finally capitulated. They had laid out the terms of their new financial agreement together. For a wild moment, Scarlett had entertained the notion of hiring enough people with Rhett's money to restore Tara to its former glory. But Will was adamant that everything that happened at Tara would start through his labor, eased and strengthened by the Butlers' money, but never magnified past his grasp. He was, at heart, a small farmer and any land he worked, no matter how vast, was soon reduced to the size and rhythms of a small farm.

It hadn't bothered Scarlett much over the years, for Tara was safe and increasing steadily, if slowly, in Will's hands. She was not sure why it should bother her now, except that seeing the deserted fields brought back that dizzy, aimless feeling she had had stepping off the train in Jonesboro, that feeling that had first erupted into her life that spring at the lumber yard to call into question all she had achieved so far and, like then, she had to struggle to tamp it down. The wagon slowed down, just as the edge of the cultivated fields became visible in the distance.

"These here are the acres I plan on plowin' next year, Scarlett," Will pointed out quietly. "Ten acres, fifteen maybe. We're goin' to clean them right up this fall, after we pick the cotton, get rid of them pines and weeds, and next spring we can plow them with the rest. If it's alright with you, I figure I'm goin' to buy another mule or a team of them for that."

"Of course," she nodded quickly, eying the dismal fields.

"Would've asked you last week about it, but Rhett said you needed your rest first and I figured he was right," he offered, looking at her from the corner of his eye, in that unhurried way he had that made his every gesture seem deceptively devoid of energy.

"Rhett told you I needed to rest?" she turned towards him with a frown.

"He did and he was right about it too, so don't be gettin' your feathers ruffled over it. It did you a world of good, far as I can see. You've had a hard time these last months."

She peered at him closely, for the first time wondering how much of the scandal that had surrounded her in Atlanta since April had made its way to the County. But there was nothing in Will's face, nothing but his customary unfazed calm that had a way of taking the wind out of her sails and, whether because of it or of something else entirely, she found she could not be as incensed at her husband's high-handedness as she should have been.

"What else did he say?" she asked, a little annoyed at herself for wanting to know.

"Not much. Just made sure everyone was right careful 'round you."

She opened her mouth as if to speak and closed it again. She remembered all too well the soothing pleasantness of the last days—how strange it was to think that it had been Rhett's doing, that he had somehow engineered it all for her benefit! And it must have been for her benefit, for what other reason could he have possibly had? She looked at Will and there was understanding in his pale eyes, like there had been on numerous occasions in the past, only that this time she wasn't sure what it was exactly that he understood. She pursed her lips and turned to face the road again.


	10. Fairhill

_Eight months in the making (premature for a baby, huh), here is the next chapter of this story. I was going to wait till Monday to post it, but it's Monday somewhere on the globe and I was impatient to share this because a) it's super long and b) it's about some of my favorite people in the GWTW universe. Now, don't expect miracles, but since summer is here I should be able to resume a slightly more reasonable schedule going forward. And unless some asshole character wants to jump in, the next chapter should be all S &R with only minor shenanigans in the background. _

_My gratitude to iso for not blowing a blood vessel at some of the previous versions of this. Her work ethics and patience humble me daily (or at least twice a year, when I have a chapter for her to read). And a warm thank you to all the nice people who left reviews during this stretch of silence. They do make a difference, eventually._

 _Now, let's meet the Tarletons, shall we?_

* * *

 **Chapter X: Fairhill**

 _"'I don't know which hit Beetrice Tarleton worse, losing her boys or her horses,' said Grandma Fontaine. 'She never did pay much mind to Jim or her girls, you know. She's one of those folks Will was talking about. Her mainspring's busted.'"_

(GWTW Ch. XL)

* * *

"Ella Lorena," Scarlett said sharply over her shoulder, "if you don't stop fidgeting this instant, we'll turn this wagon around and leave you at Tara. Your aunt Suellen was just about to start her sewing lessons with little Susie."

There was a sudden alarmed squeak from the back of the wagon and then Rhett's amused drawl rose softly, after a moment of silence. "Sweetheart, do you want to come sit here, between your mother and me? Your sister can go in the back with Luce. She's already fallen asleep."

Scarlett frowned silently at the intervention, while her husband slowed down the wagon so she could hand the sleeping child to the young girl in the back and make room for Ella, who climbed onto the seat between her parents with heretofore unsuspected agility.

Nothing on this little trip had gone as planned. They had intended to leave for Fairhill immediately after dinner and take the children with them. But first Wade was late in returning from Mimosa, where he now spent all his mornings and a good many of his afternoons as well. And when he finally did return—a little sheepish, but not obviously repentant—his clothes, shoes and elbows were in such a state that one might have suspected he and little Joe Fontaine had chosen that very day to trample all over a swamp. A scowling Scarlett had had to send him wash himself and change before they could leave.

Yet further obstacles awaited them in front of the stable. Tara had two large wagons, but they were both out in the fields, for Scarlett had not thought to retain them that morning. The remaining wagon, the one that had transported their luggage from the train station, was small, cramped… and awfully familiar. That last she realized with an unpleasant start as she came to inspect it closer. There was no doubt about it. This was the wagon Rhett had stolen for her at the fall of Atlanta, the one that had seen her, Melanie and the children back to Tara after his desertion at Rough and Ready. She had given Will Benteen firm instructions to burn it once she had enough money to buy a replacement, but it seemed he had ignored her wishes and carefully mended the blasted thing instead, for there it stood—as shabby as ever, if a little less rickety. She cast a furtive glance at Rhett, who was examining the vehicle himself, hands nonchalantly in his pockets. His eyebrows were raised, but there was no glint of recognition in his dark eyes, and she was relieved.

The size of the wagon was a problem, for it meant that Mammy could not come with them—not if she was to travel in any degree of comfort. They needed someone young and nimble, but there was no one of that description to be found, since Suellen had fiercely insisted she could not part with either of the two young women who were helping her at Tara. In the end, the daughter of one of Will's field hands offered and was promised a gold coin for her efforts. By the time the Butlers had finally left for Fairhill, Wade and Ella safely in the back of the wagon with Luce, it was already mid-afternoon. It didn't take long for Bonnie to succumb to sleep, ensconced as she was in her mother's arms and rocked softly by the trot of the horse, for, since arriving at Tara, this had gradually become the hour for her nap. She did not stir as she was passed on to Luce in the back of the wagon. Ella, on the other hand, was thrumming with energy and fairly bounced on the seat between her mother and stepfather.

"Can I hold the reins now, Uncle—Daddy?" she tripped over her words.

Rhett smiled and put one arm over her shoulder so, squeezed to his side, she could hold one of the reins while his hand was covering her small fists. This was the way he sometimes rode with Bonnie before him on his saddle, but Ella, unaccustomed to it and clumsy by nature, tugged on the reins sooner and with more enthusiasm than he had anticipated. The wagon lurched slightly to the side before Rhett soothed the horse.

"Now look what you've done!" Scarlett admonished sharply. The little girl bit her lip in almost comic dismay, but Rhett patted her shoulder and bent to whisper something in her ear, something that made her giggle and cover her mouth with both hands. Her mother hummed in disapproval at the sound.

"Don't worry," Rhett said, looking up with a small smile, "she won't do it again—will you, poppet?"

"Nooo, never," Ella shook her head, extending a cautious hand to the reins. Scarlett frowned and turned to face the road again, swallowing the peevish remark that hovered on the tip of her tongue.

She didn't know how it had come to happen, but lately she'd felt like quarreling with Rhett. No, not quarreling in earnest, for she knew that to be dangerous now and rarely dwelt on topics that would ignite her temper to it. She felt like _bickering_. Yes, bickering with him and needling him to retort. Many a time over the past few days she'd found herself fighting back a pointed rejoinder to whatever it was he was saying, or checking some sharp provocation that rose unbidden to her lips. The reasons for this eluded her entirely. It wasn't as though she missed Rhett's malicious comments or the sharp sting of his sarcasm—it could never be that! Yet there was something in the unflappable, ever so slightly distant kindness he had adopted since arriving at Tara that vexed her and provoked her, had done so ever since she'd learned he labored to protect her peace from afar. For his part, he never gave her any reason for grievance. He was unfailingly polite and quick to head off even innocuous moments, like he'd done now with Ella. She could not even detect in him the subtle, teasing mockery that had so frequently laced his courtesy before—and somehow this fact, far from soothing her, irritated her further. She crossed her arms, huffing silently to herself, while at her side an unconcerned Ella was babbling merrily in her stepfather's ear.

By the time the wagon made its way up the thickly-wooded hill to the Tarletons, the light had turned heavy and bluish, as if it already carried in it the soft, cool weight of the evening to come. Filtered by dense leaves, it fell sparsely over the darkened contours of what remained of the Fairhill mansion. The Tarletons had been slowly clearing away the ruins—whatever little they could salvage long since reused in new constructions—so only the lowest lines of its foundations could still be discerned against the darker canvass of the trees behind the house. Scarlett instinctively averted her eyes. There was no place in the County, with the possible exception of Twelve Oaks, whose death had pierced her heart with more sorrow.

But things at Fairhill were less bleak than she recalled them. As they drove up by the paddock, they could see the silhouettes of a new mare and colt in the distance, and Beatrice Tarleton striding rapidly towards them from the back fence, the black skirt of her riding habit looped negligently across one arm. And as they pulled up in front of the shabby overseer's cottage the Tarletons were still inhabiting, life and noise poured instantly out of its doors. First came the four girls, waving and cheering so loudly one might have thought they were out fox hunting. With them streamed out a dozen black and tan hounds, their shiny bodies weaving impossibly fast through the skirts of their mistresses to launch themselves in greeting at the newcomers. Finally, Jim Tarleton and Tom Randall, Betsy's husband, came out of the house, but had to stop short on the threshold. Utter chaos ruled the front yard as the guests alighted.

"Scarlett!" the Tarleton girls yelled in unison over the eager barking of the dogs. "It's been so long! Down, Brutus, down!"

Scarlett smiled at them in greeting. She'd been handed Bonnie, who sat calmly in her mother's arms, regarding the commotion around her with frank, wide-eyed interest. Her sister was not nearly as sanguine. Ella was afraid of dogs and was a fair way to climbing on top of her stepfather's head in terror. Too scared to make a sound, she clawed desperately at Rhett's shoulders to be lifted higher and higher, away from the leaping beasts, while he whispered feeble reassurance into her ear.

"Oh, look at her!" Hetty squealed, pinching Bonnie's cheeks. "Isn't she Mr. O'Hara in miniature? Betsy, just look at her eyes! And her chin!"

But her sister had already moved on to Wade, who was at his mother's side, disguising his shyness by smiling down at the impatient hounds that were milling all around him and jumping on top of each other to lick his hand.

"Why, I spy a tiny Charles Hamilton here!" Betsy announced loudly.

"I'm sure Charlie was afraid of dogs, though," Randa mused thoughtfully and was rewarded with a swift kick in the side by one of her sisters. Wade had looked up with the eager expression he always donned when someone mentioned his father. "That is," she coughed, "he must take after Scarlett there!"

"Is that a way to behave?" Mrs. Tarleton's voice cut through the ruckus. Her riding crop came swiftly down on the hounds' sides as she made her way to the little group. It touched them with more sound than force, but they yelped and ran away nonetheless. Scarlett couldn't help but notice that the Tarleton girls had drawn cautiously back as well, and she stifled a grin. "Have you been raised by wolves?" Mrs. Tarleton admonished her daughters in a high voice. "Look at that child—you've scared her out of her wits!"

"Scarlett darling," she paused to kiss her guest, "haven't seen you in a century! You look well. Ah, the O'Hara blue eyes!" she exclaimed, peering at Bonnie, and nodded approvingly to the mother as if she had done something worthy of praise.

Scarlett turned to introduce her husband, but Mrs. Tarleton had already taken a step towards him before she could open her mouth.

"Mr. Butler," she inclined her head coldly.

"Mrs. Tarleton," Rhett bowed slightly, Ella still clinging to his neck. "a pleasure to see you again."

His voice was at its most drawlingly affable, but Mrs. Tarleton examined him with pursed lips and obvious displeasure, and she did not return the courtesy. She looked instead to the little girl who was hiding her face against his shoulder.

"Is that Miss Ella Kennedy I see there?" she asked briskly. Ella's head moved up and down against her stepfather's coat. "Why, Miss Ella, what lovely red hair you have! Who even knew the O'Haras could turn out that shade? You could almost be one of _my_ brood."

Ella hesitated for a second and then she peeped out shyly, curiosity battling with the remnants of fear in her chest. No one had ever praised her ginger curls before. She tried to twist her neck so she could look at the nice woman with flaming hair without losing the comforting contact of Rhett's shoulder.

"Take heart, dear. No one with that kind of hair is allowed to be a scaredy-cat. Redheads are _brave_ ," Mrs. Tarleton said decisively as the little girl looked at her with an open mouth, her fear swallowed by astonishment.

"Now," Mrs. Tarleton turned on her heel, slapping her riding crop against the side of her boots, "let's find Cook and get these children fed."

::o::o::o::

With the children left under the servants' supervision, the adults assembled in the parlor for tea and mint juleps. The room was small and could barely hold the entire family during the week, when Randa and Camilla were away, teaching in Jonesboro. It was now full to the brim, with Tarletons seated on every available surface, quite heedless of any principle of rational organization. Thus Betsy, the smallest in her family, sat in a big armchair that swallowed her whole, while on the other side of the room her husband leaned helplessly back in a rickety rocking chair that creaked ominously under his weight. Randa, Camilla, and Mr. Tarleton had squeezed together on a small, faded sofa; leaving the Butlers little choice but to sit on the loveseat opposite, flanked on either side by Hetty and Mrs. Tarleton, on chairs of noticeably different heights.

Scarlett subtly arranged her skirts away from Rhett's knee, surveying her surroundings with displeasure. There was something in the atmosphere of this cramped room that was utterly missing in the restored parlor of Tara, just as it was missing in the industrious, well-tended front yard of Mimosa. But that unquantifiable something escaped her notice entirely; for while she understood Alex Fontaine's bitter struggle and its fruits all too well, this brand of cheerful poverty that made room for purebred horses yet stayed indifferent to more basic amenities was utterly beyond her grasp. All she could think of was that if she had this sort of shabby, mismatched furniture, she would simply not receive. And she would certainly not go around throwing money on horses, like the Tarletons obviously had. Randa was just recounting the story of how she and Mr. Tarleton had bought a new mare for her mother the previous year, the first one Beatrice Tarleton had had since Nellie's death. It was a tale the Tarletons had heard often and seemed to enjoy, for they intervened frequently in its telling.

"So we went on our mules, because we'd told Mother we were only going as far as Jonesboro. We could hardly borrow horses from Tara or Mimosa for that. It was a day-and-a-half's journey on a mule to—what's its name, Pa?" she asked and continued without waiting for Mr. Tarleton's reply. "But we were going to take the train back, you see, once we had bought the horse."

"How they thought they were going to get my poor Stella inside one of those ghastly horse boxes when neither of them has a clue about horses, I don't know," Mrs. Tarleton interjected, shaking her head. "And the noise in those things… She would have died of fear, my poor darling!"

"Well, we would have died with her, Ma. Father wanted us to travel in the same car as the horse and the mules—to soothe your darling and, I daresay, save the cost of the train tickets. But when we got to the stables, the man took one look at Father and asked for double the price—which was, of course, a lot more than we could ever afford."

"He did rob you," Mrs. Tarleton nodded thoughtfully, no real indignation in her voice.

"I never knew Father could haggle, but haggle he did—and it was no good. The man would not budge. I said, 'Pa, it's time to give up and go home,' but he turned to me and said 'And what about your mother?' and he wouldn't listen. In the end the man took pity on us and he agreed to take all the money we had in exchange for the horse. So now we had no money. We couldn't take the train anymore. We couldn't stop at the inn, as we had on our way there. But Father was happy, because at least we had the horse and that was why we went in the first place.

"So we rode all afternoon, he and I on our mules and the horse between us. And at nightfall it started to rain. Father had been talking of starting a camp fire and sleeping outside, but now, of course, we couldn't, on account of the rain. So we came by this little farm and Father went to knock on the door. And, believe it or not, the first thing he said was 'Ma'am, could you spare some shelter in your stable for my horse? I'm afraid it will catch a cold in this weather.' No mention of me, his _daughter_ , at all!"

"But in Father's defense," Betsy offered, "he only had one horse and plenty more daughters at home!"

Mr. Tarleton sighed and raised his eyes to the ceiling in the general hilarity that followed. At his side Randa was almost shrieking with laughter. "Can you imagine it? 'Betty dear,'" she mimicked her father's grave voice, drawing another sigh from the original, "'I seem to have misplaced Randa. But I've brought you a horse instead!'"

"Well, you do sound the same when you laugh," Hetty offered from across the room and ducked from her chair at once, propelled by the force of long experience. Yet the cushion Randa had launched at her head would have missed its target entirely. It was on a course to hit Scarlett, who was sipping her tea quietly among the general merriment, but Rhett's arm shot out and caught it in mid-air before his startled wife even had time to blink. The Tarleton sisters applauded boisterously at this action, and Rhett sketched a little bow and flourish with the cushion before he set it down by his side.

"Oh, Captain Butler, well done! You've saved Scarlett!" Hetty cried, climbing back onto her seat.

"Saved Scarlett?" Camilla snorted. "Saved Randa, you mean! Or have you forgotten the time Scarlett pushed all four of our brothers into the pond for _almost_ hitting her with a pebble?"

Never fond of being teased, Scarlett frowned and started to defend herself. She could already see, from the corner of her eye, a gleam of dangerous laughter spreading on Rhett's face. But before she could clarify that she had been just seven years old at the time of that incident, Hetty leapt noisily to her defense.

"Oh, she only really pushed Boyd in because he was defending Brent! And she never did push Tom. He was too tall for that by then." She stroked her chin pensively. "She bit Tom, I think."

They all laughed then—all except Scarlett—but theirs were bittersweet laughs. For Tom and Boyd were dead, and the twins were dead, and their absence was alive in the room in their stead, as if through a hazy mirror one could suddenly guess how the tale would have changed with them in it, how the afternoon would have rung with their voices and the furniture creaked under the weight of their long legs. What fools these people were—Scarlett thought fiercely, beating back the wave of her own pain—to allow the past to erupt into their conversation like that, unexpectedly. What fools they were not to protect themselves against it! But they did not look wounded by it or troubled. They looked briefly lost in a shared memory.

"Finish your story, darling," Mrs. Tarleton prompted gently.

"Yes, where was I?" Randa cleared her throat. "The nice woman at the farm. She let me sleep in the house, but she could not let Father in as well, because she was all alone, you see. So Father had to sleep in the stable—which I think he preferred anyway, so he could keep an eye on the horse. But when I saw him the next morning, he looked like he hadn't slept at all. He was all drawn and fixing to have a fever. It was still raining outside, but we decided we'd ride all day so we could be home by nightfall. By midday Father was swaying in his saddle. But he wouldn't stop. He kept saying 'Wait till your Mother sees this. Wait till she sees this.' and all I could think of was that he would fall off and I'd have to tie him to his mule to get him home."

Mr. Tarleton was stroking his beard now, looking vaguely chagrined by this portrayal. But his wife was smiling one of her rare tender smiles at him and the girls were snickering softly under their breath. It was decidedly strange, Scarlett thought, how a family could take so much delight in a story entirely predicated on their having not enough money and even less sense.

"It was dark by the time we got back to Fairhill and Mother came out of the house to greet us. She came out in her wrapper, but we didn't think anything of it. We were both shivering from the cold. Father's teeth had been chattering like castanets for the last two miles, but now he'd stopped himself somehow. He took one step towards Mother, and she started to shout at him immediately. ' _James Stuart Tarleton! Where have you been? I thought you were dead, lying in a ditch! I sent the sheriff looking for you! I sent Alex Fontaine looking for you! What have you done to yourself?'_ And so it went. The more she looked at him, the more she shouted.

"Because, of course," Randa paused with a grin, "even in my state of advanced spinsterhood I ought to have guessed it was not quite the thing for a man to disappear for three days straight without alerting his wife." She looked to her sister and Scarlett for approval, and Scarlett shifted minutely in her seat, as if stung by an invisible dart. "How Father didn't think of it, I don't know. We hadn't even told the girls where we were going, so they wouldn't tell Mother and ruin the surprise. And now here we were—with Mother yelling at us, as angry as she'd ever been. Father bent down to whisper something in her ear and then he stepped aside, so she could see the horse. And just by the look in her eyes, before she even opened her mouth, I remember thinking how lucky we were that she didn't have her riding crop with her—"

"How lucky you were that _the sisters you had kept in the dark_ hid her riding crop before she went outside," Betsy clarified with a pointed sniff.

"I don't think I saw more fury on a person's face in my life. One second she was staring at the horse, and the next she pushed Father so hard that I was surprised he stayed on his feet. And when she spoke I think they heard her all the way to the other world and back. She shrieked like a Banshee, really. ' _For a horse, Jimmy? For a horse? You thought I'd want you to kill yourself over a horse?_ '"

There was muffled laughter around the room as Randa raised her voice to an almost inhuman wail. Mr. Tarleton was looking at the floor, hiding a private smile in his beard, while Mrs. Tarleton was perched tightly on the edge of her seat, pursing her lips at her daughter's impression.

"And that was the first time I've heard Mother say anything dismissive of horses," Randa concluded her tale with a smirk.

"It's true," Hetty nodded. "She didn't even look at the horse that night."

"Oh please," Camilla waved dismissively. "She didn't look at it until we managed to put Father to bed. But who do you think was crying on the horse's neck immediately after that?"

Another round of laughter rose uncertainly in the room and Mrs. Tarleton quickly sat up from her chair. She looked, for the first time that evening, slightly embarrassed by the story. There was the faintest red spreading in her cheeks, Scarlett noticed with interest. She didn't think she had ever seen Beatrice Tarleton blush.

"Right," Mrs. Tarleton said, clapping her hands. "I think it's time we let the gentlemen retire to the porch to smoke. I have to check on Stella myself. And Scarlett dear, I will want a word with you later."

::o::o::o::

With Mrs. Tarleton gone and the men having decamped to the porch, Scarlett and the Tarleton girls were left alone in the parlor. Hetty brought out more tea and sat down next to their guest on the loveseat. Emboldened by the success of her previous tale, Randa had continued to talk, complaining quite lavishly of the teaching she and her sister were doing in Jonesboro and of their life as Nancy Wilson's boarders.

"She is—I'm sorry to have to say it—a miser. No offense, Scarlett," Randa added, having briefly forgotten that the lady in question was the late Frank Kennedy's sister.

"None taken," Scarlett inclined her head airily, for she was none too fond of Nancy Wilson herself.

"Every night she'd give us these little candle stubs, the smallest wick still left in them. ' _No sense wasting a good candle every evening!'_ " Randa wheezed out in cruel imitation of their landlady. "So the week before last we decided we would just buy our own. And you know what? When Father drove us back to Jonesboro on Sunday, we found she had cut all our new candles in half!"

"No!" Scarlett said with a horrified laugh.

"Oh yes!" Camilla interjected emphatically, from her sister's side. "She's terrible like that. But we'll be free of her soon enough."

"Are you moving back to Fairhill then?"

Camilla smoothed her shirts carefully. "No, I—I thought Randa and I might go up North next year. Father has a cousin in Boston that could take us in. We haven't told Mother yet, of course, and she won't like it much when she learns of it, but—" She paused and suddenly looked up with a slightly pleading expression. "Oh Scarlett, you must tell us. Are the Yankees _really_ so bad? We heard that you are friends with them now, you know."

Scarlett sat back in her seat, disconcerted by this news and slightly affronted by the turn Camilla's question had taken. "I wouldn't say I'm friends with the Yankees," she said evasively. "I do business with them, which is a different thing. Why, I hardly ever receive Yankees in my house—or never ones in uniform, anyway… But why in Heaven's name would you want to move up North in the first place?" she turned the tables on Camilla and could not help but sound a little condescending in the process.

"Well, what is there to keep us?" Camilla said, an edge of stubbornness creeping into her voice. She had wanted her doubts assuaged, not confirmed.

"Oh, Cammie, don't say that," Hetty sighed impatiently, casting an apologetic look to their guest.

"Why not, if it is the truth? We have no future here. Just because Betsy found a husband, that doesn't mean the rest of us will. There are no men left in the South anymore, and there is no money either. And if teaching is to be my and Randa's lot, we might as well do it up North than live with Miss Nancy and her half-candles forever. The Yankees can't be _that_ bad!"

There was a slight flush working its way up her neck as she spoke. This was an argument she had rehearsed often with Hetty and Betsy, who were now looking down at their hands in embarrassment, and she could not help but raise her voice a little to defend it. _What a high-strung chit_ , Scarlett thought with dislike, even as her mind was acquiescing to the basic logic of what Camilla was saying.

"We could ask Mr. Butler about Boston," Camilla said, her voice hopeful again. "He's been up North before, hasn't he?"

Scarlett opened her mouth to object—who even knew what nonsense Rhett would tell this girl, being the devil that he was—but Randa spoke up before she could. She had been examining her fingernails for the last minute, as if the conversation had nothing to do with her whatsoever.

"Mother _will_ kill him if he tells you anything," she now said dryly.

"Oh, but Mother hates him anyway," Camilla said quickly and two of her sisters winced. "I am sorry, Scarlett, but it is the truth. She will never forgive him for what he said at Mr. Wilkes' barbecue all those years ago. Do you remember? He talked about the South and how we were going to lose the war. Stu and Brent were there and they wanted him dismembered on the spot."

"Well, he was right, wasn't he?" Scarlett said coldly, drawn to Rhett's defense by the sting of this censure.

"And that is exactly why Mother hates him," Camilla nodded. "She never lets go of things like that—and she's only gotten worse over the years. Father won't let us say anything to her about going to Boston. It would break her heart, he says. As if they hadn't run away from their families when they were much younger than we are! But we will go eventually. He can't hold us back forever."

 _Well_ , Scarlett thought, a little nonplused at this passionate speech. _Well_. She looked around her in the room—at Hetty and Betsy, who were squirming uneasily in their seats; at Randa who seemed perfectly content where she was and not terribly concerned by the idea of Boston; and, finally, at Camilla herself, who looked stubborn and flushed and very much like a child who had pleaded their case and was ready to cross their arms in defiance. She nodded slowly, not sure what she should say to all this. Fortunately for her, she did not have to say anything. For the door opened just then and Mrs. Tarleton stuck her head in, oblivious to the tension swirling in the room.

"Scarlett," she said, "do you want to walk with me outside for a moment?"

::o::o::o::

The air had turned crisp, deeper blue and violet starting to mingle at the margins of the sky, as Scarlett and Mrs. Tarleton made their way towards the horse paddock. They had gone through the porch, where the men were smoking cigars and exchanging slow, companionable words. Rhett raised a quizzical eyebrow to his wife as she made her way past him and she shrugged slightly in response. He was lounging in a chair, Bonnie on his right knee, steadily undoing the buttons on his vest, Ella on his left, struggling for some reason to fasten them back. Bonnie was winning, for the work of destruction had always gone faster.

Mrs. Tarleton crossed the yard in a swift, determined way that, had her frame not been so delicate, would have looked decidedly masculine; and Scarlett had to gather the narrow skirt of her dress in one hand to be able to keep up. She was not sure what Beatrice Tarleton could possibly have to discuss that would require privacy. The things Camilla had said about her mother and Rhett had caught at her mind and she was half-wondering whether Mrs. Tarleton might not want to express an opinion on her matrimonial wisdom, as she had when Suellen had married Will. But surely that could not be it, not at this late date. Still, she steeled herself for whatever was to come.

"Right." Mrs. Tarleton came to an abrupt stop, resting one booted foot against the fence. Stella, her mare, came galloping across the paddock at the sound of her voice. She was a truly splendid animal, all sinews and shine, red as the long-lost Nellie had been. Her riding crop tucked beneath her arm, Mrs. Tarleton reached out to pat the star-shaped splash of white between the mare's eyes.

"Right," she said again. "As your mother is not with us anymore, I thought I ought to talk to you, Scarlett. It's about your miscarriage. Your sister told Betsy, you see."

For a moment, Scarlett was frozen in place. She had not expected this. She could not even gather the presence of mind to be angry at Suellen for her gossiping ways. All she felt was a slight tingling in her nostrils, as if someone had splashed cold water into her face.

"And what I have to tell you is this," Mrs. Tarleton continued, turning to face her fully. "You have to try again for a child, right away."

"I—" Scarlett stammered, supremely uncomfortable.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't blush. I know what I am talking about. I lost a child, you see, when Mr. Tarleton and I were first married. I was young and foolish and I thought I knew what I was doing, because I knew a bit about horse breeding. But I didn't, really. I didn't have my mother with me either, because Mr. Tarleton and I had eloped and moved out here alone. Not that she would have been much good, mind you. She knew less about these things than I did. So I took to my bed and, when I left it, I walked around in a daze, like a sleepwalker. Not eating, getting rail thin, always thinking of what had gone wrong, afraid to try again for fear it would go wrong again. My luck was that Mr. Tarleton was worried and he wrote to my Grandma for advice. She wrote back and knocked some sense into my head. And then we had Boyd."

Scarlett wet her lips, unsure of what she was supposed to say in response. She had never been one to find easy purchase in other people's stories and, in this case, it was hard to see whether purchase could be found at all, for Beatrice Tarleton's reading of her situation was far off its mark and could not be set straight, not without Scarlett revealing the painfully hard knot her marriage had become. Without thinking, her eyes flew to Rhett in the distance. The Tarleton girls were now out on the porch and Camilla had approached him, she noted with a frown. But she was relieved at least that he was safely out of earshot for the present conversation.

"Scarlett," Mrs. Tarleton said more forcefully, tapping the top of her boots in emphasis, "what do you do when a horse throws you? You get back in the saddle at once, before fear has time to settle in your bones. You have to get back in the saddle."

"Get—back in the saddle?" Scarlett said startled, looking away from her husband and Camilla. There was some indefinable vulgarity about that phrase that had blood rushing back to her cheeks.

"Don't be dense. You know what I mean. You should be having healthy babies in no time at all. I won't say I like your husband—I don't. But I know good stock when I see it, and he _is_ that. He is handsome, yes, but that's not how you can tell. You tell by the shoulders and the bones. Big, healthy bones. It's why your youngest is so good looking, too."

Scarlett stifled a small, appalled laugh at this dispassionate appraisal of her husband. Once she got on the topic of good stock and its features, it was almost impossible to stop Beatrice Tarleton. And she had to be stopped at once, before she started comparing Rhett to horses and moved on to her favorite subject, breeding in the equine realm and its many lessons for humans.

"Mrs. Tarleton, thank you for this," she said, with as much earnestness as she could feign. "I appreciate it and I—I will do my best to follow your advice."

Mrs. Tarleton frowned a little suspiciously at her words, but then she relaxed and gave her a brisk nod. How odd it must be—Scarlett thought later, as they were walking back to the house—to live in Beatrice Tarleton's world where everything was simple and came down to breeding and horses. Or perhaps not everything, she mused, Randa's unearthly wail rising to her mind. _For_ _a horse, Jimmy? For a horse?..._ Mindful of the evening chill that had started to descend, Mr. Tarleton had made his way to the paddock to bring a shawl for his wife. Scarlett looked at them from the corner of her eye as they were striding back to the house—the tall, bearded man adjusting his pace to match that of his small, spirited wife, who had linked her arm through his without thinking.

Everyone in the County had always thought Beatrice Tarleton didn't have much use for the girls and her husband. The boys and the horses had come first in her heart, and when they were gone, she was broken by their loss. Yet she hadn't crumpled straightaway, like Gerald had, and Scarlett now realized that was only because Mr. Tarleton had been there to keep her from falling. For years the stone wall of his love had stood behind her, silent and unyielding, holding her up the way one holds up a tree uprooted by a storm, hoping it might live despite the damage. And for years everyone had secretly thought it was in vain. Old trees rarely survive such calamities. But they had been wrong and Jim Tarleton had been right. For Beatrice had her horses and the promise of grandchildren, and she was restored to him now. Embittered and holding on to the past, perhaps, but alive. Camilla was a fool to think her father could ever be swayed to endanger this balance, Scarlett thought.

"Will you be staying for supper, dear?" Mrs. Tarleton asked, turning her head.

"No, they are waiting for us at Tara," Scarlett said. "We must be going before it gets dark."

Rhett was already waiting by the porch, Ella and Bonnie clinging to his legs. Neither of them had won the battle with his vest. Its top buttons were undone and the bottom ones fastened quite askew. Scarlett fought against a sudden urge to reach out and fix them, and hid her hands in her skirts instead. Wade stayed a little apart from his sisters and stepfather, digging the tip of his shoe into the red ground. He had been playing with the dogs all evening, cunningly escaping the company of adults.

"It was a pleasure to meet you, sir," Mr. Tarleton shook Rhett's hand. They had met before, of course, but those had been less pleasant circumstances and present congeniality dictated they should be forgotten. "And perhaps you and Wade might like to join me for a spot of hunting next week? We've good game in these woods. Enough for a stew anyway."

"What do you say, Wade?" Rhett turned to his stepson.

Wade rubbed at a spot of red dirt on his hand. It clung like rusty blood to his skin.

"Can Joe come as well?" he mumbled, looking only at Mr. Tarleton.

"Little Joe Fontaine?" Mr. Tarleton smiled. "Why, of course. He'll be a good hand with the rifle one day, that boy. Though I don't know that we need another Fontaine with a gun around these parts."

And with that they were off, hurrying home against the dark advent of night.


	11. Splendor in the Grass

_*tap tap* Ahem, is this thing on? Is anyone still there? Here's a new chapter for this old story. It finally has a little something to tie R &S fans over. (We're getting there, guys, slowly but surely.) It also ties in with the last section of chapter 4, so anyone looking for a refresher should look there, although I think this is pretty straightforward reading without it, too. With many thanks to iso and E. who read this chapter and gave very useful advice._

 _ETA: If you've visited the site last week and already seen this update, ignore it. FFdotnet email alerts were down for the last ~10 days and, as they confirmed they wouldn't be sending out any lost alerts from that time period and I tend to rely on email notifications rather than visit the site myself, I've tried reposting it instead.  
_

* * *

 **Chapter XI: Splendor in the Grass**

 _"Talking to Rhett was comparable only to one thing, the feeling of ease and comfort afforded by a pair of old slippers after dancing in a pair too tight." (GWTW, Ch. XXXVI)_

* * *

She heard them before she saw them. She'd gone to Jonesboro that morning with Will, who needed to make arrangements for the upcoming harvest. First picking was almost upon them and more field hands needed to be hired. On the way back, they were silent— Will chewing placidly on his straw, Scarlett lulled to pleasant drowsiness by the rhythmic creaking of the wagon and the calm promise of the road unwinding before her, a sinuous red ribbon between fields of green and white. She had been both vaguely tired and a little restless that morning, an echo of yesterday's exertions at Fairhill, yet now both feelings were gone, replaced by a sort of dreamy contemplation. She could already picture in her mind the cool stillness of her room at Tara, the soothing darkness that would descend once she drew the curtains for her afternoon rest. And then, as the road coiled along the wide pastures that lay close to the house, there was an unexpected sound drifting on the wind, calling her to attention.

She sat straight in her seat. The song, an old marching ditty, was familiar, as were the singers' voices. _When_ Bonnie _comes marching home_ , one of them stressed stubbornly over the others, melting almost into a shriek on the desired name change. A man's baritone slid smoothly below the piping voices from time to time, to save the wavering tune. As the wagon finally turned a bend in the road and the singers came into view, Scarlett's eyes widened in disbelief. There was her youngest, decked in a puffy white dress, finer than even her usual taffeta and lace. Its ample skirt was embroidered with colorful little flowers that shone in the sun and matched the small riot of flowers on Bonnie's sun hat. Behind her, marching determinedly through the red dust, were her sister and cousins, all three of them in what looked like their Sunday best. Finally, bringing up the rear was Rhett, in his usual attire, a split-oak basket in the crook of his arm and a net attached to a thin rod on his shoulder.

He inclined his head amiably as the wagon came to a stop, and the girls rushed to its side in a swirl of chirping voices. Scarlett was frozen in dismay for a second as she caught full sight of her nieces. They were not merely wearing their Sunday best—they were wearing the new dresses the Butlers had bought for them in Atlanta, and fine white stockings, and delicate patent-leather shoes that already sported streaks of red dust. Had Rhett lost his mind, taking them out of the house dressed like that? What would Suellen think? She raised stormy eyes to him, fully prepared to give him a piece of her mind, but he'd remained a few steps behind the children, smiling an almost infuriatingly benign smile. Scarlett scowled at him from a distance before looking down at the girls.

"Darlings, don't talk all at once!" she chided in a brightly tight voice and was granted a brief moment of silence. "Now, where are you going? Isn't it time for your dinner and naps?"

"We are going to have a picnic, Aunt Scarlett," Susie replied primly, eager to dispel any impression of irregularity as concerned her own person. She was the only one that had kept a proper distance between herself and the wagon. The other three girls hovered close to its wheels and Bonnie looked as if she was assessing her chances of climbing up its side to her mother.

"Bonnie sweetheart, don't touch that!" Scarlett said sharply. "You'll get mud all over your pretty dress. And _why_ , may I ask, are you wearing your pretty dress outside?"

The question, much like her first one, was aimed at Rhett, but he made no move to reply, his smile growing just a touch wider under his mustache. His daughter, however, was quite up to the task of answering it without his intervention.

"I want to be queen," she said, taking a small step back from the side of the wagon and pushing Sollie and Ella back with her in the process.

"You want to be queen?" Scarlett frowned and could barely keep herself from rolling her eyes. _Of course_ it would have to be some foolish tale Rhett had concocted for the girls. He had an endless supply of them, each sillier than the last.

"Yes, queen of the butterflies!" Bonnie nodded vigorously.

"Oh," her mother said weakly and sat back in her seat.

"We're not going to have a picnic, Mommy," Ella piped in, casting a disdainful look at Susie. "I mean, we are…" she stumbled and frowned, "but—but we are going to find butterflies! And we're going to have a contest. Remember when you said—"

"Butterflies, how lovely!" Scarlett cut her short with bright, determined cheerfulness. She remembered all too well what she'd said and was none too eager to have it repeated in front of Rhett now, for him to know exactly how hard she'd had to work to coax Bonnie into coming to Tara. God only knew how he'd mock her for that! And nothing between them was settled and perhaps he'd wonder why she'd wanted Bonnie at Tara and… She would have to let the matter of the girls' attire pass, she decided quickly.

"Well then," she smiled airily down at the small group, "I hope you catch the prettiest butterflies. Just make sure you are back in time for—"

"Oh, but, Mommy, won't you come with us?" Ella interrupted in a plaintively hopeful voice.

Scarlett opened her mouth to refuse and was immediately cut off by louder exclamations from Sollie and Bonnie.

"Come with us, Mother!"

"Yes, Aunt Scarlett, do!"

Hands clasped high in front of them, the girls jumped up and down, trying to outdo each other in pleading most dramatically, and raising a small cloud of dust in the process. Susie alone was silent and looked more than a little appalled at the childishness of her peers. Scarlett tried to intervene, but it was in vain. Only the sharpest of tones would have cut through the girls' combined energy now—and that, under the circumstances, she could not deliver. At her side, Will clucked mildly to the horse, which had begun to stir uneasily at the noise. He made no move to chasten his daughter.

"Yes, my dear, why don't you join us?" Rhett's deep voice cut through the ruckus. He looked amused by her predicament, but otherwise quite guileless, as if he earnestly wanted her to join them on their picnic. It made it harder to refuse without seeming ungracious—which he probably knew quite well. Scarlett opened her mouth and then hesitated, sensing with some irritation that any reply would send the prospect of a quiet afternoon rest irretrievably out of her grasp.

"I can tell Sue to wait a little on dinner," Will spoke quietly from her side.

"Oh, there's little need for that," Rhett offered comfortably. "We've enough food with us to feed a small army."

"Oh, all right," Scarlett sighed resignedly and the girls cheered so loudly the horse had to be reined in.

Rhett made his way to the wagon. "Girls, salute your new captain," he said as he helped Scarlett down and the girls shrieked loudly once more. They then waved a long, enthusiastic goodbye to Will as the wagon got smaller and smaller on the red road, while Scarlett stood undecided in place, carefully smoothing down her skirts.

"Well, where were you headed to?" she asked when the noise finally died down.

"Down to the river?" Rhett shrugged, as if he hadn't given the matter much thought.

"The river?" she looked up in surprise. "That's a little far for a picnic, isn't it?"

Not to mention that there weren't any butterflies to be found by the river, but that was _not_ a subject she was about to raise with him.

"Unless, perhaps, you have a better place in mind," he inclined his head solicitously.

She gave the matter a moment's thought. "We could go to the orchard."

"The orchard, a splendid idea!" She cast him a quick look, but he pressed on before she could decide if he was mocking her. "Lead the way, my good captain."

"We'll cut across the pasture here." He followed the direction of her outstretched hand and a slow smile spread over his face.

"Jump over the fence, you mean?"

"Well, would you rather walk half a mile to the gate and half a mile back to enter the orchard?" she asked with peeved practicality.

"Jump over the fence!" Bonnie clapped her hands excitedly. Her cousin Susie, finely attuned to the intricacies of polite manners despite her tender age, looked vaguely insulted by the idea.

"No, sweetheart," Scarlett said firmly. "You're not jumping over the fence. Ladies don't climb fences. Your father will go to the other side and I will hand you to him."

Rhett looked thoroughly entertained by her speech, but he complied. He set the basket down and passed the butterfly net to his daughter. And then, with one hand on the post, he swung his large frame over the fence with startling speed. Scarlett moved to pick up Bonnie, but he stopped her with a short wave of his hand and reached over the rails to lift up the children himself. Scarlett handed him the basket and then set her foot determinedly on the lower rail.

"Do you require assistance?" he asked, leaning casually against the post. Behind him, the girls had already set out across the field.

Scarlett shook her head. "I have climbed fences like this all my life."

"I thought ladies—"

"Do you mind?" she ground out, motioning for him to move away before she made her way over the fence. He took a step back, but remained close to the post until her feet touched the ground on the other side. Though nimble, her climb over the rails had exposed her legs up to her knees and she looked up at Rhett expecting to find leering or mockery on his dark face. She found neither, just a strange little smile of almost tender amusement that smoothed itself to blandness under her curious gaze. It made her feel obscurely embarrassed and she looked away from him as he picked up the basket. Before them, in the sun, the girls had broken into a run, chasing each other with the butterfly net and hollering with laughter in the lazy summer air.

"Oh, they will fall and ruin their dresses," Scarlett moaned, as she and Rhett made their way across the pasture. "You shouldn't have let them wear their good clothes outside."

"They insisted they had to," he shrugged, "and who was I to contradict them? Today was to be our day. We've been hunting for that mythical butterfly field for a long time now—since the day after we arrived, in fact—to no avail. But then it's always the natives who know these places, I'm told."

There was something slightly alarming in the offhandedness of that last sentence and she looked up at him in suspicion. Sure enough, a hint of the old devilish light was there in his dark eyes. It occurred to her that he had known all along that she had been the one who'd told Bonnie about the butterflies, but he'd chosen not to wield that weapon openly for some reason. She hastily turned her gaze back to the girls running in the distance. They were now almost at the gate.

"Suellen will be furious when she sees their dresses," she said to fill the silence.

"I will graciously take my penance."

"As if she'd say anything to _you_ ," she said, more peevishly than she'd intended, for his obsequiousness toward Suellen didn't fail to rankle. But he did not pick up the gauntlet. They closed the distance to the orchard in silence, and he stepped aside to let her pass through the gate first.

Tara's orchard was the crown jewel of Will's talents. He had endless patience for pruning, grafting and propping—and trees tended to reward such patient work. Dotted with fruit, their crowns melted thickly into one another, each row a long green cloud anchored by slender dark trunks to the carpet of daisies and cornflowers below. Scarlett led the small group past fragrant peach trees and the heavy shadows of apple trees to the very back of the orchard, where fruit had been picked early and cheerful bright flowers stretched all the way to the surrounding fence and beyond.

"Look, Mother, butterflies!" Bonnie gasped and ran towards the fence, her chubby arms stretched out in greeting. Yet the delicate wings eluded her, flitting brightly out of her grasp.

"Don't worry, poppet, they'll come after we have lunch," her father consoled her.

They rounded a thicket of pomegranate trees and laid their blanket in the shade. Someone more mindful of finery than Rhett was had packed four large napkins to be tied around the girls' necks and cover their frocks. Thus enveloped in linen, they ate—Bonnie and Sollie assisted by the adults, Ella and Susie on their own, sitting as far from each other as the blanket permitted. A pointed conversation between her mother and Scarlett the week before had forced Susie to be civil to Ella, as long as any adults were present. Yet she had started exacting revenge on her cousin in cunning little slights, too small and too numerous for Ella to be able to appeal to any authority outside the nursery again.

This tension notwithstanding, the girls filled the air with bright chatter, as if a host of noisy sparrows had descended on the blanket, making it unnecessary for the adults to converse. It suited Scarlett quite well, for she didn't want silence to fall between her and Rhett. She had felt like engaging him quite a few times over the past days, but those had all been peevish retorts, quickly swallowed back for fear of the animosity they would revive. Now, at close quarters, she couldn't imagine what they could possibly talk about. Every subject seemed either conspicuously dull or else threaded with danger. After they'd eaten their lunch, Rhett went away to pick fruit for dessert. He returned with blushing fuzzy peaches for the girls, weighing down the pockets of his coat, and a pomegranate for Scarlett. "Here, my Proserpine," he said as he handed it to her. She blinked up at him in confusion, but she took the proffered fruit nonetheless and let him cut it open for her, after he'd sliced the peaches for the children. And then the feast was over, cutlery and plates were returned to the basket, and it was finally time for the girls to catch the promised butterflies.

They rushed to the fence at once and sat down in the sweet-smelling grass, spreading their skirts around them like the petals of strange colorful flowers. For a few moments, they were silent, holding their breaths with the sort of impatient solemnity they would, in the years to come, wait for beaus to invite them to dance. Yet butterflies were less than taken by their charms. Fickle suitors, they fluttered carelessly past, dipping teasingly close and then dancing out of reach again. And every time that happened, the girls would gasp in dismay and Bonnie would move to catch them outright, driving them even farther out of her reach.

From the blanket, Scarlett surveyed the scene with a half-smile. There was a faint ring of the past to it, of her own childhood, trickling down through the years to this summer afternoon. Sunny mornings on the front lawn, clouds billowing lazily past, the tender smell of cloves and summer blossoms in her nose. Hot afternoons in the orchard, bickering with Suellen over a place in the shade, the crispness of apples not yet fallen from their branch. And as the lines of those old, almost forgotten days melted softly into the present summer tableau, she was grateful that Ella and Bonnie had this, that Tara was here for them still, abiding when all the world had changed. Yet mixed with that gratitude was a certain puzzlement and, with it, that strange disquieting vertigo that had overtaken her so many times since spring.

For against this brightly-lit picture there was the intimation of another, darker knowledge struggling to reach her consciousness—that nothing had turned out as she had expected. Little of what that young girl in yesterday's orchard had dreamed of or anticipated had come true. And instead _this_. Her children, her husband, her life. And behind them other things still harder to grasp and more painful, ranged like in the dark background of a painting. Ellen gone, Gerald gone, the world as she'd known it gone. And however dimly she realized it, it made it hard to hold on to the pleasure of the present moment or even to the more durable satisfaction this moment embodied, the satisfaction of having at least saved Tara from the wreckage. For, knowingly or not, it would always be there, lying in wait to catch her eye—a chip in the brightness of today, the inescapable shadow of a fracture line in the mended whole.

But she had never been one to dwell on things that were either painful or confused. There was no use to it. She pushed the uneasy, half-formed feeling from her mind, and cast a furtive look at Rhett. His eyes were closed and he looked supremely at ease, stretched out on the blanket like a big, lazy tomcat. She should join the girls. It would be good to lie down in the soft green grass and surround herself with their gaiety. Rhett wouldn't notice (and why should she care if he did?). But something in her didn't welcome that thought. Something in her was restless and dissatisfied and resisted soothing. She was not sure herself what she needed, except that she wished she had refused to come to the picnic after all. She sighed and brought her knees up, resting her elbows on them and her chin in her hand.

"What's ailing you, Scarlett?"

He was not asleep after all. He'd opened his eyes at her sigh and propped himself on one elbow to watch her. But there was nothing in her thoughts that bore sharing.

"Nothing," she shrugged. "I…"

"Did things not go well in Jonesboro? Should I expect to be sent out in the fields in two weeks' time?"

"Of course not. Will spoke to some men for the picking. He'll clear fifteen acres down by the river bottom after that—for next year."

"Not much," Rhett shrugged, drawing out his cigar case.

"No, but it's more than anyone else around here. We've been to the Tarletons, the Fontaines—they're not doing any better. People around Jonesboro who've taken tenants and sharecroppers might have more of their land in use, but for the rest..."

She trailed off, waiting for him to say something in reply. She was vaguely aware that she had been stung into defensiveness and, faced with his renewed silence, cast around for something to add. But the words that came out, halting and unsure, were not what she had imagined she would say.

"No one else is doing better. The rest of the County... it's as if it's deserted. When we drove back from Mimosa this week, everything was pine trees and brush, as far as you could see. And all the old houses are in ruins, but there's no one left to fix them, and the fields around them are just growing up wild."

"'Round the decay, the lone and level sands stretch far away'," Rhett said softly.

"What?"

"Nothing. Go on."

"Well, there's nothing much to say, really. Will said it would take fifty years for any of it to be fixed. And even the farms that are doing well… We would have been lost without Will, but we are only farming a tenth of Tara and we will never farm more than half. Not if we have to rely on cotton alone. There is no money to be made in cotton anymore. Will said so himself. The Fontaines—Alex wanted to buy a cotton mill, so he could have enough money to marry Dimity. Alex Fontaine, a mill owner! He works harder than anyone in the County, Will included, and he still can't make ends meet."

The words flowed easily from her now, as he smoked silently and listened. She wasn't sure where all these things she was telling him had sprung from, for she hadn't been thinking of them at all before she had started speaking. But it was easy to talk to him about this, where all other topics were hard. And it felt so good to talk; it was if something that had sat painfully coiled in her throat was slowly unwinding and she was carried away by the relief of its loosening. Without realizing it, she folded her legs under her as she was talking, turning to fully face Rhett.

"And the Tarletons—they could live quite well off horse breeding, I suppose, if they were sensible about it, but not the land. And even so, the girls won't stay here. 'Randa and Camilla are quite set on going up North, and I suppose Hetty will have to as well, unless she wants to be an old maid her whole life. But just to think of them up North or—or marrying Yankees... No one would have ever imagined it would come to this before the war. But then no one would have ever imagined they would be old maids either. They were the belles of this County. After me and Cathleen, of course."

She saw him smile at that, a quick flash of white teeth under his mustache. "Rhett," she said after a small hesitant pause, "what did you tell Camilla yesterday? Did—did she ask you about Boston?"

"I told her Bostonians are nice people with terrible accents. Though I fear good country people from Georgia find Charlestonians every bit as bad. You thought as much yourself when you visited the old place, if memory serves. Though maybe you've changed your mind since?"

"Oh, be serious."

"I _am_ serious—and quite disappointed. But shall we return to your problem?"

"My problem?"

"Isn't what you were describing a problem? It strikes me as a very familiar one. A soldier goes out to war, returns to find the world he fought to defend is gone. It stings doubly if the war was won."

"The war? But we lost the war..."

"Don't be literal, Scarlett. I meant your war, the one you started when you went forth to slay innocent men in your mother's velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster."

"Slay innocent—" she started indignantly, but Rhett put a hand up to stop her.

"Innocent, I say, but slayed for a good cause. Food and shelter for yourself and your family, no cause more sacred. And we can agree, I think, that you've won that war quite handily. Bar the unexpected downfall of this country, you and your kin will never be hungry again. You have more money than you can spend in this lifetime, almost certainly more than your own father had before the war. You have a house that reflects this fact, much like this house here reflects your father's rapid ascension to wealth. And you have Tara. But there is a rub, isn't there?"

She cast him a wary look, suspecting some further quip at her expense. This was the problem with Rhett. He could be perfectly pleasant and patient and listen to all of your troubles with that small shrug of his that cut things down to their proper proportions without dismissing them unduly. Yet sometimes, unpredictably, instead of comforting you, he would turn nasty.

"And the rub is this, what you've been telling me. That you might have won your war, but you have not turned back the clock. That the world has changed irreparably. That Tara is still here, but Tara is a farm. That even the people who have not gone under have changed. So that perhaps winning was not enough. Perhaps having enough money not to go under was not enough."

"But none of these people has enough money!" she protested. "If Alex Fontaine or the Tarletons had money, there would be no problem for them. And if Will only took my money, Tara would be back to its old self in no time at all. Same for everyone else in the County. If they had enough money, they would be fine. They wouldn't have the old things, true. But they would have new things that are just as good, and they would be happy."

"You think so, my dear? Has money made you happy?"

Carried by the hotness of her previous words, she started to say, "Of course it's made me happy!" But somehow, she couldn't speak.

"It's a silly question," she finally said, averting her eyes. In the distance, the girls gasped loudly as a small white butterfly landed on the tip of Susie's shoe. Susie smiled palely in victory.

"Is it?" he said mildly. "I do beg your pardon. But even if your County people had money, it would still not be the same. Look, if you will, at Atlanta in all its bustle and prosperity. It is richer now than it ever used to be. Yet would one rather have this new Atlanta, with all its riches, over the old? Even you, in your better moments, might balk at that."

This time she didn't move to protest. Because his words had stirred the memory of another conversation, the one she'd had with Ashley before it had all gone so disastrously wrong in the spring. She could hear herself protesting that she liked the glitter and excitement of the new days, and heard the lie in her past voice just as clearly as Ashley had at the time. And suddenly she was weary.

"Of course I liked the old days better," she said. "But what good will it do to pine for them? You know you can't move forward if you have your memories like a stone around your neck to hold you down. You'd only be like"—she almost said _Ashley_ , but caught herself in time — "like someone who won't face the present and can't see the future."

Rhett put out the stub of his cigar in the grass. When he spoke, his voice was almost gentle.

"But, my dear, it is not always a question of facing the present and seeing the future. It is often a question of _seeing_ the present—as it truly is, not as a fall from the dreams of childhood or as a momentary unpleasantness to be faced for the sake of a better future to come. Your comparison is apt; some people, perhaps the vast majority, wear their past like a stone around their necks. But then there are others, who cut free of its weight entirely. And they can't see the present either, because they are borne unthinkingly into the future. They only ever strive for the future. People, I've come to think, need weights to tie them down and force them to see what's under their eyes."

There was something there that was meant for her. She was not sure how she knew it, just that she did. He was talking about her. And for the first time she felt she was close to understanding what he was saying in his cryptic fashion, that there was something in his words that was relevant to her situation, perhaps even essential to it, if she could only grasp exactly what it was. Someone reaching for the future and not seeing what was under their eyes—her practical mind could not untangle that and set it aside. But the other part of what he was saying was clearer. He thought that one could make do with a load of painful memories, that it was better somehow to hold on to them than cut loose.

"But how would sitting around dwelling on the old days help anything with—with what you're saying?" she finally asked. "It would just drag at your heart without stop and make you wish everything was different."

Rhett, who had been watching her face closely, suddenly smiled.

"Not if you see the past for what it is. Neither totally good, nor totally bad. Most people look at it through the eyes of the child or youth they once were, and they can never see beyond that. If they enjoyed their life, they think the past was good, always and for everyone, and they can never stop longing for it. And if they've had the misfortune of living in times of war, the old days are forever the time before the suffering and ruin, and hallowed in their memory. But the old days had their own brutality, their own wrong-headedness—if not for themselves, then for others."

The letters from Ellen's secretary, now safely tucked at the bottom of her jewelry box, suddenly came to her mind and she shifted uneasily on the blanket. What would Rhett say about that, she wondered. Perhaps she should ask him. Perhaps he would know what to do. And suddenly she was impatient for him to finish talking, her mind no longer on the topic at hand.

"If one were to look at the past with clear eyes," he continued, "one would see the need to embrace only parts of it, without clinging to the whole or chasing its return. People who don't are broken down by the weight of their own memories, or else they hang around like grown men still waiting to receive the toy sabers they longed for as children. And so, my dear—"

But he never did finish his thought, cut short by a sudden noise. For back by the fence, the game of waiting had exhausted its charm for Bonnie. Her sister and older cousin had both been graced by the winged critters, and even the young Sollie had managed to stop fidgeting long enough for a butterfly to land on the hem of her dress. A few moments of staying still might have yielded her, too, the coveted prize. But nowhere in Bonnie's blood was there patience to sit and wait for the objects of her desire to come to her on their own terms—and it would have been surprising if it were, for neither of her parents possessed that quality. And so she abandoned her post and set out to catch the butterflies by force. She chased them the few steps to the fence, waving the butterfly net enthusiastically and casting it down with enough force to make the tall grass blades flatten to the ground. Once, twice—and then, on her third try, the net caught the top of a post and was trapped. She pulled to dislodge it, but the fence was old and rotten. It had been built years ago by her uncle Ashley, himself a less than able carpenter, and when she pulled again, it started to come down on her with a loud, frightening creak. And then everything happened at once. She cried and drew back, letting go of the net. The girls turned to look at her and screamed. The fence leaned at an angle and stopped its descent a couple of inches above her head, half of its rotten post still clinging to the ground.

And then her father was by her side, having leaped from the blanket so swiftly that Scarlett, still frozen in place, barely had time to perceive his motion as a dark blur at the edge of her vision.

"Are you hurt, sweetheart?" he asked, going down on one knee at his daughter's side. She shook her head and started recounting what had happened, rubbing one small fist against her cheek. Rhett listened gravely, nodding from time to time, and looked at the fence when she pointed accusingly to it. Scarlett, who had started making her way towards them, stopped awkwardly in place a few steps away. Neither of them showed any signs of noticing her presence, so she changed course and enlisted the girls to help her fold the blanket instead. It was clear that the picnic was over; and, over her momentary fright, she had the unsettled sensation of one who had been rushed up from their meal before they had finished. Well, it didn't matter, there would be other times for Rhett and her to talk, now that they were back on friendlier terms.

Back on the sun-dappled field, Rhett whispered something in Bonnie's ear. She nodded and came running to join the little group in the shade. As her small hands grasped her mother's skirts, Scarlett turned around just in time to see Rhett plant a foot on the leaning fence. He pushed, with a sort of calm brutality, until the rotten posts gave way with a sudden cracking sound and that whole section of the fence was flat on the ground. He looked down at it, and there was complete silence for a moment. Then he turned to face the wide-eyed group by the picnic basket.

"Will would have needed to replace it soon anyway," he said to Scarlett, whose shock was giving way to anger. "It hadn't been properly set in the ground."

He had a point there and she didn't have time to think of a reply, for he made his way to her side and picked up the basket.

"Shall we go?" he asked. "We might as well go through the fence there, since it's closer to the house."

She nodded a little warily and they made their way to the missing section in silence, the girls still a little subdued by the unexpected turn in their afternoon. Rhett picked up Ella and Bonnie and stepped easily over the fallen fence with them, to keep them from stumbling through the rails. He came back for Susie and Sollie, and then Scarlett alone was left in the orchard. Rhett turned back and extended his hand to her. She looked at it, then down at the fallen rails, and his upturned palm stretched out in an age-old gesture of impatient appeal. She placed her hand in his and, leaning on its strength, stepped across the old crumbling wood and out into the field.


End file.
